Bane

32 years ago - Antonio Diego is born on the island nation of Santa Prisca, forced to serve his father's life sentence in Pena Dura.

24 years ago - 8-year-old Antonio kills a fellow prisoner for the first time. He begins having nightmares about a menacing bat, which will haunt him.

10 years ago - 22-year-old Antonio, the strongest specimen in Pena Dura, is used in the Venom experiments. He becomes Bane.

4 years ago - 28-year-old Bane escapes Pena Dura and makes his way to Gotham. He frees the prisoners of Arkham to torture Batman, then confronts him and breaks his back. He takes over Gotham's underground (battling Waylon Jones in the process), until Jean Paul Valley, acting as Batman, brings him in.

3 years ago - 29-year-old Bane escapes prison suffering severe withdrawal from Venom & hunts the scientists that created the drug. He is chosen by Ra's Al Ghul as a new heir, but Talia Al Ghul refuses to accept him and he refuses to accept his place in the League of Assassins. In retaliation, Bane unleashes the Leagues bio-plague Contagion on Gotham, and destroys dozens of Lazarus Pits worldwide, until he is finally defeated by Bruce Wayne.

2 years ago - 30-year-old Bane is recruited into the Suicide Squad. He kills Atomic Skull when he goes berserk. and assumes de facto leadership of the team.

Bane is actually NOT one of the newest additions to Batman's Rogue's gallery. Plenty of newer baddies have been added to the ranks of Gotham's worst, but it is safe to say that Bane is the newest character that feels wholly necessary. Bane is one of his core villains, right up there with Two-Face and Scarecrow and the Riddler. What's even more impressive is that he attained that role immediately from the moment he stepped onto the page. This is a testament to the excellent work that went into his design, of course, but perhaps even more so to the amazing story he was invented to tell.

Bane's Comic History

Bane's first actual appearance was in the one-shot Batman: Vengeance of Bane from early 1993 by Chuck Dixon, which introduced him and set up his backstory, but this book was clearly made in support of the massive Knightfall story arc, which ran through Batman #492-500 & Detective Comics #659-666, in which this new villain Bane literally breaks Batman. He was intended to be a dark spin on Doc Savage, with influence from both luchador culture and the Count of Monte Cristo... which is such a bizarre combination, but the results are just so cool.

Because The Death of Superman was published only a few months before, it's very easy to look at the massive cultural impact of that story and assume that Knightfall was an attempt to do something similar with Batman, but the reality is that both the Superman and Batman teams had annual writers summits, and Knightfall had been in planning for several years. The whole idea was to push Batman to his breaking point and to replace him with a character that was an indictment against the 'extreme' violent characters popular in comics at the time, only for Bruce to have to reclaim his mantle. This was a real fence swing of a story concept, especially since it never telegraphed what it was doing. While this story was ongoing, we simply understood that this was the new status quo for the character.

Notably, we've been talking almost entirely about the Knightfall arc, and not about Bane himself. This is largely because Bane operates more as a plot device than a character; he exists because the whole structure of Knightfall required an insurmountable force to break the hero, and he was purpose-built for that role. The image of Bane breaking Batman's back is beyond iconic, and a lot of that is because years of design and plot construction went into building that moment up.

This is probably where Bane and Doomsday actually do share the most in common because as characters purpose-built for one specific story beat of one specific story, it becomes kind of hard for the character to retain the same relevance moving forward. Bane had the benefit of still being a Batman character, and as such got to be part of several more named storylines that continued to appear across the 90s as a wrecking ball of a character, becoming the new heir to Ra's al Ghul and then turning against him, but it's hard to follow up a story as big as his debut.

Perhaps the biggest evolution of the character happened in the pages of Gail Simone's Secret Six, where he became a surrogate father to series lead Scandal Savage. While this was an amusing spin on an otherwise brutal character, It does really indicate just difficult it was proving to find a role for him. In more recent years, you really don't see any attempt to innovate with Bane at all, but instead just see that original story retold over and over.

Our Bane Story

The real challenge in trying to adapt Bane is in the central paradox of his initial concept; He is built whole cloth for one story in particular, and is so specifically tailored to that role that it actually becomes nearly impossible to work out how to use him once that story is completed. There's a very real argument to be made that, since Jean Paul Valley's Batman needs to go too far at some point and kill someone, it might actually make more sense for that someone to be Bane. The problem with that is of course that Bruce will never get a chance to eventually defeat him once he becomes Batman again, but also that it really is a shame to lose such a popular, dynamic part of Batman's rogues gallery.

So instead, we want to find a role for him that doesn't water down his concept. His role in the Contagion arc, where he becomes a new heir to Ra's Al Ghul only to turn on them when Talia rejects him is actually a really great escalation of the character. After that, we've taken his association with the Secret Six and redirected it into the Suicide Squad, even made him part of the arc we're manufacturing where a new team lineup immediately implodes when Atomic Skull goes crazy. Bane killing him just feels like such a great showcase for the cold-blooded savagery of this character, but also primes him to be a part of the strange, dysfunctional family of the Squad.

Bane's Future

Bane is part of the newest lineup of the Suicide Squad as we leave our timeline, and we actually imagine this particular group should work together quite well for some time, so for now, this is as much of Bane's future as we have planned.

Bane gets used quite a bit in a lot of different corners of DC's extended media. Whether it's Cristopher Nolan's funny-voiced bruiser or the far more menacing ruler of Santa Prisca in the Young Justice animated series, versions of Bane can be found all over the map, but the stories we happen to believe are the most relevant are the ones that tie Bane with Ra's Al Ghul and the League of Assasins.

Simply put; there is a real argument to be made that Bruce is essentially destined to take over the League, and that this is the natural evolution of his war on crime. The only thing stopping him is the fact that Ra's will only ever give up control when someone kills him, Bruce will never kill him, and no one but Bruce COULD kill him...

Or... maybe not? Maybe the visions of Bats, and the strange connection Bane feels between his destiny and Bruces is actually some indication of the role Bane will someday play in the mixed fates of these men? Somewhere in the future there is going to be some sort of reckoning between Bruce and Ra's, and it seems all but inevitable that Bane has some role to play in that final conflict...

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