YMMV / Gotham Central

• Complete Monster: Harlan Combs, from the "Motive" arc, is a yuppie who bought the costume and equipment of C-list supervillain Firebug, hoping to attain the ultimate adrenaline rush. Using the Firebug costume, Combs set various buildings in Gotham aflame, including apartment complexes occupied by dozens of people and a baby, hoping to make a name for himself through blood and ash. When his teenage babysitter found his suit, Combs beat her to death and staged it to look like a kidnapping, later trying to burn the girl's homeless friend alive to tie up loose ends. When caught, the spiteful Combs tries to set the arresting officers and entire GCPD building on fire to escape.
• Fair for Its Day: Like so very many works focusing on homophobia and people's struggles with it, to modern readers (especially younger ones) some parts of Half a Life and the general homophobia Sawyer and Montoya contend with can seem absolutely shocking and perplexing. And, of course, to highlight just how quickly attitudes in America and elsewhere have changed, said storyline is not quite fifteen years old. Even a few of the heroes can seem not really as openly supportive of Montoya or Sawyer as they should - which wouldn't fly today, but at the turn of the millennium it was simply how most men were expected to act and react to the situation at hand. For added context, after Montoya is outed, while only one of the MCU detectives, Tommy Burke, openly shows any homophobia, there's also only two who vocally support her: her partner Allen, and Detective Crowe.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • The characters all work for the Major Crimes Unit, an unremarkable acronym back in the mid-00s, but now reads as amusingly ironic in a DC comic in wake of the fame of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
  • Renee Montoya once ranted out Maggie Sawyer when Maggie told her that she knew how she felt. A large part of her rant is her being latina in relation to her also being lesbian. Maggie's character in Supergirl has been race lifted as latina, and in fact she's quite a bit like Renee.
• It Was His Sled: Renee Montoya is gay, Two-Face stalked her and she begins to descend into violence and alcoholism as the series comes to a close. Her history is one of the basic premises of 52, a very successful and high-profile series that picked-up after Gotham Central ended, and Gotham Central itself received a lot of press and critical response (Including three awards) for this arc. To many comics readers the series is known as "the one where they outed that chick from the cartoon."
• Les Yay: In a storyline involving a dead teenager dressed as Robin, members of the Teen Titans are questioned by the police in order to confirm that Robin is alive, as they have no way of determining if the uniform is authentic or a costume. When Starfire arrives, every man smiles and stares, eliciting a disgusted "men" from Detective Romy Chandler. Detective Joely Bartlett smirks and points at Maggie Sawyer and Renee Montoya, "You think?" Maggie even mentions that "You should see Wonder Woman."
• Moral Event Horizon: For a while Corrigan does not seem like too bad of a Dirty Cop, no worse than the usual evidence-tampering scum of Gotham, but when he starts torturing other cops and kills Crispus Allen, he stops being small-time petty evil and becomes somebody asking for a bullet. Or The Spectre.
• Tear Jerker: If you can get through this series without reaching for a tissue at least once, you are simply inhuman. Every character experiences loss, defeat and horror that no person should ever have to go through, and then they soldier on and keep going, slogging through more heartache until the end, because everybody knows "It's Gotham."
• The Woobie: GCPD Officer Andy Kelly in Keystone Cops who is painfully mutated by one of Doctor Alchemy's experiments while saving a kid's life accidentally kills his girlfriend while breaking out of the hospital and has to be put down by his own partner right as a cure is becoming a real possibility. His girlfriend and partner also qualify.