Now, if you fear no spoilers, read on.
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Can we all please agree on a ten-year ban on any more stories involving a lost friend or family member of Bruce Wayne, who is part of some secret society or conspiracy, coming out of the woodwork to make Batman's life a living hell? It was done with Bruce Wayne's childhood best-friend Tommy Elliot in Hush. It was done more recently with a character who may or may not have been a not-quite-dead Thomas Wayne in Grant Morrison's Batman run. And now, in what turns out to have been a nod to both Grant Morrison's Earth 2 and an old World's Finest storyline, we find that the leader of the Court of Owls is Bruce Wayne's long-lost brother Thomas Wayne Jr.
I'll spare you the details save to say that this revelation is something of a shock and the pages leading up to it are well-paced and thrilling. But the idea that this new "Owl Man" is a long-lost Wayne brother smacks of the worst kind of melodrama, even if there is a precedent for it. At this rate, I wouldn't be shocked if it was revealed that Alfred hired actors to play the part of super-villains in order to keep his young master away from real, dangerous criminals and that Alfred himself was The Joker. Don't laugh - Neil Gaiman put forth that idea in "Whatever Happened To The Caped Crusader?" and it has just as much pedigree as World's Finest #223. Besides, the back-up story - involving a tale of Alfred's father's time as the Wayne Family butler - has hinted at some dark secret that Alfred has been hiding from Bruce for years involving The Court of Owls and his own mother's conflict with them.
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Is this issue worth reading? Absolutely. While I detest this "twist", I must admit that the writing around it is well-crafted. And the artwork is - as always - some of the best we've seen on any Bat-book in years. Greg Capullo was born to drawn Batman and the back-up story artwork by Rafael Albuquerque employs the right sort of grotesque distortion. Whatever else I may say about this book, it is not dull and it is not bad.
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