[2] He is commonly depicted as a brutal and ruthless crime lord in Gotham City who has a fixation with masks and derives sadistic pleasure from the act of torture.

Additionally, the TV series Gotham introduced the character's father Richard Sionis, portrayed by Todd Stashwick, who was later integrated into the comics during the 2016 relaunch DC Rebirth as The Mask.

Moments after Roman's birth, the doctor carelessly dropped him on his head, and his parents covered up the entire incident so that their high society friends would not find out.

Roman lacked his father's business acumen and eventually ruined Janus Cosmetics by funding a failed line of face-paint make-up.

Desperate, Roman had the staff chemists create a product that was rushed to the market without proper testing, disfiguring several hundred women.

Before he could unlock the Sionis crypt, a lightning bolt struck him, blasting the door open and hurling Roman head-first into a nearby stone.

Each member of the False Face Society wore a distinctive mask, and the gang's crime spree spread rapidly throughout Gotham, eventually attracting the attentions of the police and Bruce Wayne, now operating as the vigilante Batman.

While Batman and Robin fought his underlings at the graveyard, Black Mask escaped through a false bottom installed in his father's coffin and headed to his family estate.

Black Mask then entered his old bedroom and set fire to the old toys inside, intending to burn the mansion to the ground to symbolically kill his old identity as Sionis.

Before Black Mask could escape, Batman flung a Batarang-attached cable around the crime lord's knees, causing him to fall face-first on the burning floor just as the bedroom's rafters began to collapse.

He soon begins the False Face Society anew, rising through the ranks of Gotham City's underworld while furthering his vendetta against Bruce Wayne.

[11] Black Mask remains at large throughout the events of "Knightfall" and "Zero Hour", and resurfaces shortly thereafter to kill rival mobster "Dirty Dan" Doyle in an ambush shootout.

He controls a large portion of Gotham's criminal underworld until the city is destroyed by an earthquake in the "No Man's Land" story arc.

After destroying Catwoman's youth center, Black Mask kidnaps her sister and brother-in-law, the latter of whom he tortures to death with power tools, before forcing the former to eat pieces of her husband's corpse, including his eyeballs.

In the storyline Batman: Under the Hood, Black Mask then becomes the overlord of Gotham's underworld, gathering enough financial resources to purchase an Amazo android and a large supply of kryptonite.

The real Batman eventually exposes Rodriguez and captures Black Mask, but the crime lord kills the escorting officer transporting him to jail and escapes again.

[14] Later, a series of attacks by the Red Hood (revealed later as being a resurrected Jason Todd) causes Black Mask to lose power and money to this new rival.

[18] During the Forever Evil storyline, Black Mask appears as a member of the Secret Society of Super Villains when the Crime Syndicate arrive from their Earth.

[23] In Teen Titans Rebirth, Damian Wayne imprisons Black Mask in a secret prison after learning about his involvement in the destruction of the Arab restaurant Tarbooshes.

He utilizes his various connections to eliminate opposition and consolidates power using fear and intimidation; he is renowned for his brutally sadistic physical and psychological torture techniques, which he uses either to extract information or simply to torment his enemies for entertainment.

He is a skilled hand-to-hand combatant and has displayed impressive levels of stamina and endurance; his high tolerance for pain has allowed him to hold his own against accomplished fighters such as Batman and Catwoman.

He is eventually revealed to be Jeremiah Arkham, who took up Roman Sionis' mantle after suffering a psychotic breakdown from exposure to a variety of mind-altering chemicals from various Batman villains.