One benefit to Batman villains is that they can serve a whole spectrum of genres. The Penguin can be both a corrupt businessman and a horny sewer creature. The Joker can be both a silly lunatic and a haunting metaphor for domestic terrorism. And there are few better examples of this than Black Mask, the Gotham City gangster who is both a notable crime boss and a leering horror character thanks to his malice and his ghoulish, well, black mask. Sadly, he's never quite risen to the level of the A List, as Gotham's rogue's gallery is a fairly crowded one.
But if any series is going to change that, it's Absolute Batman, which reinvents Black Mask as a being of not just hyper ruthlessness but anarchy. He's the perfect arch-villain for this new Batman to take on, not because he's the Dark Knight's antithesis, but because his warped ideology is a funhouse mirror to everything this Batman stands for.
