BTW, I love these #5 covers...
And I love Snyder's description of the Court of Owls:
I'll tell you this, what I want to do is I want it to be an enemy for Bruce where I wanted to create something that really scares him in a big way. For me that takes a slow build; it's not just somebody who pops up and is frightening, because Bruce has faced the scariest guys face to face and taken them down time and time again. This is something that is a bit more of a creeping horror and something that's been there in the background. We've actually tried to tease the symbol of the Court of Owls at different times in "Detective" and in "Batman" #1 and in different places as well. So it's an idea that's been in the atmosphere for me and Greg and some of the others guys I was talking to about it when we were doing "Detective" for a while. Not just one person or an organization made of characters that are visible the way something like the Black Glove was, but it's much more insidious in that the way owls nest wherever they want; this sense of their presence being in places that Bruce never would have expected, really close to home and in places he considers safe. And that their instruments of power and the way that they've manipulated things historically in Gotham are going to be sort of shockingly brutal and frightening to Bruce. He is really up against a very scary enemy in its meaning and its nature with the Court of Owls, and then in its actual physical manifestation and the things they send to kill him.I just want to say one other thing about this idea of owls, that in some ways if Gotham is at a crossroads with this symbol, this organization that's decided to come out of the woodwork to finally turn this big eye towards Bruce and say, "You know what? We're sick of Batman, let's crush him and his whole world," there is this sense of the Bat being the only Bat but there's a lot of sense of bird imagery that we've tried to use in "Detective" and in "Batman." So, is Gotham really a city of the Bird or a city of the Bat? In that way a lot of the characters who have been Robins and such and a lot of the characters in Bruce's Bat family will be pitted against him. To me, at the end of the day, one of the great storylines in Batman is the sense of Dick Grayson eventually having to bring Bruce in; I think you see parts of that in "Batman Beyond" and "Dark Knight Returns." He's the son who is meant to take down the father if he's ever gone too far, and that's a story we're really playing with too and a theme and a note we're trying to hit and play up because I think it's one of the saddest, most fascinating and heroic kind of storylines in Batman.