Gotham Central References In Dark Knight Viral Material

Newsarama recently reported that a new Dark Knight viral website has launched, an online edition of The Gotham Times. This fake newspaper is startlingly detailed and features four pages of full-length articles, most of which focus on the aftermath of the events seen in Batman Beyond. There's plenty to enjoy, but most surprising to me were a few references to one of the most critically acclaimed Bat titles in recent years, as well as a personal favorite of mine; Ed Brubaker and Greg Rucka's crime series, Gotham Central.

The evidence after the jump...

There's a Letters to the Editor section on page two, and the second letter (titled "Major Letdown?") is about the formulation of the Major Crimes Unit, the branch of the Gotham City Police Department that Gotham Central focuses on. This by itself might not be a direct reference to the comic, but the next example is more explicit.

On the front page, there's an article titled "Dent Tip Line Targets City's Dirty Cops", which reports ib how ADA Harvey Dent is launching a campaign against corruption in the GCPD (apparently it's "dividing the city" in half). In the continuation of this article on Page 3, the fifth paragraph down contains a list of cops that are under investigation for corruption. Included are Jim Corrigan, Roger DeCarlo, and Timothy Monroy.

Roger DeCarlo and Timothy Monroe (presumably misspelled as Monroy) are a team of dirty cops featured in Gotham Central #32, in which they haphazardly kill a runaway girl only to find out she was under the protection of Poison Ivy (d'oh!). Jim Corrigan should be a very familiar name to Gotham Central fans (as well as old-school fans of The Spectre but let's disregard that for now), as Corrigan was a crooked CSI officer and one of the series' main villains.

As much fun as it was to spot these references, I'm not sure if their inclusion mean much. The list of corrupt cops includes a number of other names, and everyone on the list including those I mentioned can be found on the GCPD Police Roster on Wikipedia. So either the writers behind this paper are really up on their Bat-history, or they're just handy with Wiki research. Either way, seeing Gotham Central characters mentioned in the context of the new movies rekindles my hope that the old rumor about Renee Montoya making a cameo will be true. Don't play with my emotions, Warner Brothers!