Nightwing #16 (HERE BE SPOILERS!)

I have to say, I'm pretty damn surprised that Higgins has Joker destroy Haly's Circus here.  Plus, when I say destroy, I mean, destroy.  From the bodies of deceased members to the lives of current members to the structure of the circus, Joker destroys all of it.  Has Higgins been planning on that?  Have the last 16 issues of "Nightwing" been setting up this moment, giving Dick a raison d'être in his personal life only to have it ripped from him by Joker?  Even for Joker, it's a pretty brutal attack; after all, it stands to reason that Dick's parents' bodies were in there somewhere when Joker brought down the circus.

But, it makes me wonder if Joker has been misrepresenting himself, or, at least, if we've been misinterpreting him.  Maybe he doesn't really want to "murder" the Bat-family.  It'd be too easy.  Maybe the "death" in "Death of the Family" is a metaphorical one.  When the dust settles and Barbara contemplates the fact that she was almost driven to murder Joker and Dick realizes that everything that he ever had has been stripped from him (plus whatever Jason and Tim experience at Joker's hands), it stands to reason that they're going to blame Bruce.  He knew that Joker knew their identities and he didn't tell them.  Sure, Bruce can pretend that he didn't think that Joker really knew.  But, he was pretty clearly wrong.  So, by not allowing the Bat-family to draw its own conclusions from the evidence, Bruce has made himself solely responsible for this mess.  He's the reason that Barbara's mother lost a finger, why Dick lost Haly's Circus totally and completely, and whatever happened to Alfred happened.  It's all on him.  When they all leave him, furious at him for failing them so greatly, it stands to reason that he'll focus his anger fully on Joker...giving him exactly what he wants.

If Snyder plays it this way, then I buy it.  I totally buy it.  I buy the estrangement that we're probably going to see in the next few months of Bat-books and the anger that Bruce will likely feel.  At this stage, it's the only conclusion that I could see coming from this event that would make me buy it and, increasingly, I think that it's where Snyder et al. are going. Fingers crossed.