Reread Grant Morrison’s run on Batman and have come up with many crazy ideas as to the identity of Black Glove.
Alfred. Classic of pulp crime novels ‘The butler did it’. Perhaps under orders from Bruce Wayne. What would happen if Batman won his war on crime? Would he know? Would he walk away? Or would he construct for himself a nemesis of such great intellect and knowledge that he gives Batman a new focus so that he can continue.
Speculation abounds online since #677 that it is Thomas Wayne and that he really did fake his death. Good reason for Bruce to quit if his primary motivation was taken away from him. That he can never avenge his parent’s deaths as his father never died and was responsible for his mother’s death.
Another theory occurred to me when I considered that perhaps Detective Comics and Batman although ostensibly separate titles telling different stories might actually be telling the same story. And the Batman RIP story does crossover into the other Bat-titles anyway. The villain Hush returns in Detective soon and I wondered what if Thomas Elliot had be named after his father and was actually the illegitimate offspring of Thomas Wayne. He would be Thomas Wayne II which is the true identity of Owlman the evil counterpart to Batman in Morrison’s Earth-Two graphic novel.
In fact the more I read it the more weird and fucked up this whole run of issues seems.