I have just now realized that this cover is a Batman rip, and also a part of "Batman R.I.P." That must have been intentional.
While there's certainly some disturbing allegations made about Thomas and Martha Wayne, and about Alfred Pennyworth, in this issue, it's Jezebel Jet's suggestion that Batman is the Black Glove that's really the most damaging, as far as the reader goes. We're told, at the very beginning of the previous issue, that Doctor Hurt is capable of creating information out of nowhere to back up his claims, so the discovered dossier of incriminating evidence against Bruce's parents could easily be that. But Jezebel's suggestion that Bruce really is sick, something that people have played with many times over the Batman's publishing history, is really quite damaging. Yes, we've seen the Club of Villains, we might even have presumed that Simon Hurt is himself the Black Glove...but what if he's not? What if something deep down in Bruce Wayne's psyche, utilizing his near-unlimited resources, has funded something both to test his own deductive capabilities, and also to tear down the creature he has become? It's an intriguing hypothesis. We'll have to see how it plays out.
With luck, next week's graphic novel will be the Morrison/Jones/Mahnke Final Crisis, which ties in to the Batman story we've been looking at the last little while. After the fact of Final Crisis, Morrison wrote two more issues of Batman that fill in some of the missing moments between the end of "R.I.P." and Batman's subsequent appearance in Final Crisis, and I'm trying to decide if I should read them in narrative order or publishing order. We'll see.
So things are looking bad for Bruce. Zur-En-Arrh. See you tomorrow.
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