Right, for all those who have not yet read Batman #10, here’s a fair warning. I will not warn you again, so here it is: Everything from here on out is spoiler territory.

This week sees some of the biggest, shocking moments of the Batman of the New Fifty-Two. Talon turns out to be some sort of mash-up between Hush and an owl and manages to make Thomas and Martha Wayne not the paragons of virtue they were previously believed to be. They’ve now had a handicapped or mentally insane child they’ve dumped at an asylum. Or maybe not. As Scott Snyder has said, they’re not entirely sure if he really is Thomas Wayne Junior or not.

Anyway, the presumably last Talon and Batman are duking it out. Their big, final climactic battle. How will it end? And here’s where DC has made a mistake. Remember back when they didn’t announce the New Fifty-Two? Suddenly, the solicitations stopped. Nobody knew anything. And even when people inquired, DC didn’t give definitive statements. So for a month or so, the comic book fans were in the dark. Was the lack of solicitations a glitch? Something they oversaw? Or were they really going to reboot everything? Could they reboot everything? Remember that excitement?

That proves that it’s possible that DC can have something exciting coming up without telling us that it’s coming up. And let’s look at the possible endings of the Court of Owls, without even getting into the slow decline of the story from the possibility of there being a massive conspiracy that has some hidden agenda but also might only exist in Batman’s mind to them being a group of people who have zombies that must be punched in the face. Here’s what we know.

Neither Batman nor Talon will die.

This leads me to the conclusion that either Batman will say one of the two sentences that follow: “Go free, Talon. Find your destiny.” Or “Damn you, Talon, you have escaped!” How do I know this? Simple, I’ve had a look at the solicitations. This is what I’ve discovered.

TALON - Writer James Tynion IV with co-plotter Scott Snyder. Artist: Guillem March.

Meet Calvin Rose, the only Talon to ever escape the grasp of the Court of Owls. This former assassin of the Court is trying to live a normal life ... but that’s impossible when he’s being hunted by his former masters!

To have an ongoing comic book, you need a lead character who is alive and somewhat free of baggage. Having Thomas Wayne Jr. no longer be burdened with that name and having done away with the Lincoln March alias would be just that. We’ve all read comic books before. We know how this works, right? So why pitch this book to us? It’s not like we know who Talon is just yet, thus we don’t really care about him up until now. We don’t care about him as a person, we care about the Court of Owls. Their entire point up until now was that we didn’t know who or what they were. So now we’re getting an ongoing book about someone we don’t know who or what he is yet. Now, I’m not against the Talon book existing. It might even be good, even though I can see it being marketed as the Dark Avenger route, where Talon is fighting the good fight, uncovering bits and pieces of his past while being more brutal than Batman and probably a bit more insane.

Couldn’t they just have announced Talon’s solo-book next week? Would that have hurt them so much?