Bane

And here we are, the last part (for now) of casualgamer‘s request. With the gigantic Bane we speak of the last character officially revealed for the upcoming Injustice: Gods Among Us. Bane made his first live action appearance in Batman & Robin, portrayed by Jeep Swanson (and by Michael Reid McKay in his skinny version). In the movie, he is Antonio Diego, a serial killer transformed by Dr. Jason Woodrue into a massive brute who can barely speak, a hulking, idiotic minion for the villainous Poison Ivy. He received a better portrayal in the recent The Dark Knight Rises, in which he’s introduced as a mysterious terrorist, a genius mastermind trained by the League of Shadows, who attacks Gotham City and utterly defeats its protector Batman. In the comics, Bane is some sort of amalgamation between the body of the Swanson’s version and the mind of Tom Hardy‘s one.

Bane’s real name is unknown, but we know much about his past to understand his origins. He was born the son of Edmund Dorrance, better known as the mercenary terrorist King Snake. When Dorrance was condemned to a life sentence penalty in Santa Prisca, a Caribbean republic, he escaped, leaving his lover and his newborn son behind him. Santa Prisca’s authority didn’t want to renounce to punish the criminal, and especially refused to be mocked at because of a single escape. The Government, whose popularity was rapidly decreasing because of a widespread corruption, decided that Dorrance’s son would have suffered his father’s life penalty, unless King Snake came back to take his place… something that clearly never happened. Bane, who was merely a child, and his mother, were locked up in Peña Duro, an incredibly tough and violent prison. His mother died when he was still very young, and he was forced to assist to the “funeral”, during which the prison guards threw the woman’s corpse down of Punto De Tiburon, the prison’s cliffs, into the shark-infested waters beneath. This event, with the fact of being alone in a prison full of murderers and bandits, hardened the child’s heart, but also sharpened his resolution of surviving. His only friend in the prison was a teddy bear he always kept along, named Osito, but he managed to find some sympathizers between the political prisoners of Peña Duro, including a Jesuit priest, who gave him classical education and taught him to read and wright. He started to read every book he could put his hands on, using his photographic memory to memorize every single notion he found; he also started to train his body in the prison’s gym, becoming quite muscular for a boy his age. He committed his first homicide at the age of eight, when another prisoner tried to attack him, and the little boy stabbed him with the knife he kept concealed inside Osito’s body. From that day, the boy started dreaming of a giant bat, who haunted him in his nightmares. Growing up, the boy became a man, and the man became the undisputed king of Peña Duro, feared by all the other prisoners. Young Bane had become and extremely intelligent and strong man, with no regard for human life, a harsh tyrant in a harsh world.

Everything changed in his life when the guards took him away from the prison, forcing him to be a test subject for a new experimental drug, Venom. Every other prisoner used for the experimentation had been killed by the drug, but Bane survived, even if barely. Furthermore, Venom increased his body size, his strength and resistance, giving him a superhuman body which could finally keep pace with his brilliant mind. Venom, however, had a side-effect, causing a total addiction to it: if Bane didn’t inject it directly in his brain through a system of cables every twelve hours, his physique suffered from a great debilitation. In the following days, Bane heard stories about Gotham City and its vigilante, Batman: he saw the city as a universe similar to Peña Duro, since fear ruled there as it was ruling in the prison; Peña Duro feared Bane, while Gotham feared Batman. He started to see Batman as the resemblance of the demonic bat that had been haunting his dreams since childhood, and decided to destroy it. He escaped Peña Duro along with three accomplices, Zombie, Trogg and Bird. He arrived in Gotham, and took his time to study Batman, instead of attacking him directly. He destroyed the walls of Arkham Asylum, letting all the prisoners escape. Catching the criminals took Batman three months, a period during which Bane studied him, and arrived to guess his secret identity. When the time arrived to attack, Bane was waiting for his enemy in Wayne Manor: the two of them started fighting, but the hero was just too exhausted from his long hunt to be a match for Bane. The fight ended in the Batcave, where Bane lifted Batman upon his head, and crushed him on his knee, breaking his spine and leaving him a paraplegic. From that day, Bane would have been known as The Man Who Broke the Bat. Bane became the new Gotham’s crime lord, and was stopped months later by Wayne’s successor, Jean-Paul Valley, after a fight in which both the criminal and the new Batman almost got killed. In the following years, Bane became a recurrent threat for Wayne, who took back his Batman mantle, and all the other heroes in Gotham and outside of it, but also proved to be capable of heroic deeds, becoming a member of the reformed villains’ team Suicide Squad. He managed to quit with Venom, and, fighting his addiction, trained his body to the maximum human possibilities, still being a lethal opponent for whoever crossed his path.

Bane is a genius tactician with an incredibly brilliant mind and a photographic memory that allows him to learn anything in no time; he fluently speaks several languages, both active and dead ones, and has a complete mastership over many scientific fields. Bane trained his body to keep up with his mind, and is one of the greatest martial artists on planet, having been trained by masters such as Ra’s Al Ghul, under which he served as a bodyguard for some time. His strength, agility and speed are on peak human levels, but, when fueled with Venom, he easily reaches superhuman levels, becoming even more dangerous. On Venom overdose, anyway, he sacrifices his mind to pure strength, something that has been proved to be a major weakness.