What’s next for Batman after Final Crisis?

Batman is dead.  In this week’s issue of “Final Crisis”, Batman died at the hands of Darkseid.  I always felt that if DC were to ever write this story, (I’m not including the death of Earth 2 Batman or any Elseworlds stories) Batman’s death would come at the hands of one of his rogues.  It would be an epic tale where the Joker or Ra’s would finally succeed in getting one over on Bruce in a moment of weakness. 

So now that he’s dead, where do we go from here?  Well we know DC will be putting “Detective Comics” and “Batman” on hiatus and in it’s place will be a three part miniseries entitled “Battle for the Cowl”.  We can assume from the title that there will be a fight of some sort to see who will take over as Batman.  The players are: Nightwing, Robin, Jason Todd, and Hush.

This is much different that what we saw during the “Knightfall” trilogy where the mantle was simply given to Jean Paul Valley aka Azrael.  Bruce’s relationship with Dick Grayson was estranged at the time and Tim Drake was too young, so for some reason it was deemed fitting that the character of Bruce Wayne would rationally relinquish the most important thing in his life to this guy he barely knew - but that’s ancient history now.

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