Gotham Central Digs Up a Forgotten Year One Villain in Corrupt Cop Arnold Flass

DC is reaching back into Batman: Year One for its newest Gotham crime book. Batman Bad Seeds: Gotham Central #1, from writer Christopher Cantwell and artist Jacob Phillips, resurrects Arnold Flass — the dirty GCPD detective Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli introduced almost forty years ago as one of the corrupt cops working under Commissioner Loeb.

Flass has been mostly absent from DC's main continuity since, with the character generally understood to have died at the hands of the Hangman Killer back in Batman: Dark Victory. Outside of the occasional alternate-universe cameo, he hasn't had much of a presence on the page in decades.

The new series drops him back into a GCPD that's rotten in a different way this time, working under a corrupt Commissioner Vandal Savage rather than Loeb. It's a deep-cut pull for a book built around Gotham's police department rather than the cape-and-cowl side of the mythos, and it plays into the same corrupt-institution territory that made Year One work in the first place.

Original reporting: Bleeding Cool.