Dispersionless bands, such as Landau levels, serve as a good starting point for obtaining interesting correlated states when interactions are added. With this motivation in mind, we study a variety of dispersionless ("flat") band structures that arise in tight-binding Hamiltonians defined on hexagonal and kagome lattices with staggered fluxes. The flat bands and their neighboring dispersing bands have several notable features: (a) flat bands can be isolated from other bands by breaking time-reversal symmetry, allowing for an extensive degeneracy when these bands are partially filled; (b) an isolated flat band corresponds to a critical point between regimes where the band is electron-like or hole-like, with an anomalous Hall conductance that changes sign across the transition; (c) when the gap between a flat band and two neighboring bands closes, the system is described by a single spin-1 conical-like spectrum, extending to higher angular momentum the spin-1/2 Dirac-like spectra in topological insulators and graphene; (d) some configurations of parameters admit two isolated parallel flat bands, raising the possibility of exotic "heavy excitons" and (e) we find that the Chern number of the flat bands, in all instances that we study here, is zero.