So's the issue in question.
Keeping this vague enough that I don't think it needs spoiler tags:
It's not clear whether Batman dies. (My money is on "no".) There's a bit about "The next time you put on the cowl will be the last", he's missing at the end, and then they cut to "six months later" implying there's A Batman active, but you don't see him and it's unclear whether it's Bruce.
There's an arc coming titled "Battle for the Cowl", and the promo art features Catwoman, Hush, and the three Robins, but there's been little info on what's actually going to happen. The obvious guess is that Nightwing becomes Batman, but I give Morrison much more credit than that. He's also not the guy writing the arc, so I find it unlikely that it will have any direct bearing on his stories when he comes back to the book afterward. (Since this post is geared toward people who don't follow DC, it bears noting that last year there was a series called Countdown to Final Crisis that, as it turned out, had fuck-all to do with Final Crisis and in fact pretty much flatly and repeatedly contradicted it.)
...Actually, speaking of FC, the latest ads for it suggest IT'S going to show us what happens to Batman.
...Anyway. In summation, I don't know any more after reading #681 than I did before reading it. And Morrison seems to have been lying about the big bad being a character everybody's heard of, unless he was actually serious about all that shit at the end about him being [spoiler]the devil[/spoiler].
It did a pretty good job of tying together everything he'd done on the series to date, but I still didn't understand a word of it.
