Black Mask

Born in the darkest corners of Gotham's criminal underworld, Black Mask made his chilling debut in Batman #387 in 1985, a Bronze Age creation from the minds of Doug Moench and Tom Mandrake that immediately signaled something genuinely unsettling had arrived in DC's flagship city. Over four decades of publication — from the mid-eighties all the way to 2026 — this villain has proven himself no mere footnote, racking up appearances across Batman, Detective Comics, and most notably Catwoman, where he looms large as one of Selina Kyle's most formidable adversaries. The company he keeps — Batman, Bruce Wayne, Catwoman, and Roman Sionis among them — speaks to how deeply embedded he is in Gotham's power struggles. If you're tracing the evolution of DC villainy from the Bronze Age forward, Black Mask is absolutely a character worth knowing.