Knightfall Recall: Vengeance of Bane

Batman Knightfall Volume One (2012)

"...I could kill you... but death would only end your agony -- and silence your shame. Instead, I will simply... BREAK YOU!"

For a Batman-obsessed kid growing up in the 1990s, Bane was inescapable. Between his appearances in Batman: The Animated Series, Joel Schumacher's Batman & Robin, and toy shelves, Bane's hulking figure and lucha-inspired mask let you know he was a foe to be reckoned with. Yet somehow despite watching the cartoons, movie, owning an action figure or three, reading Denny O'Neil's Knightfall novelization, and doodling away during elementary school, I've never read his introductory story arc as a whole. But no more, dear reader.

In this series, I'll be reading Knightfall, a massive line-wide story arc that was originally published throughout most of 1993. My text will be the collection published in 2012, containing Batman vol. 1 #491-500, Detective Comics vol. 1 #659-666, Batman: Shadow of the Bat #16-18, Showcase '93 #7-8, and Vengeance of Bane. Are you ready to begin?

Batman: Vengeance of Bane

Written by Chuck Dixon, Penciled by Graham Nolan, Inked by Eduardo Barreto, Colored by Adrienne Roy, Lettered by Bill Oakley

Art by Glenn Fabry

Published in January 1993, this 64 page special marks the first appearance of the child born condemned to a life sentence: Bane. In an efficient piece of storytelling, we are given Bane's backstory and introduced to the group of men who will aid him on his quest to prove himself as an alpha of a cruel world after becoming the most feared man in the prison he was born in: Peña Duro, the Hard Stone.

In this hellhole, the boy only known as Bane is condemned to a life sentence after his father's failed insurrection on the Caribbean island of Santa Prisca. Here he witnesses a murder before he turns six years old. After being knocked unconscious in a prison brawl, he has a vision of his future self as a conqueror who has nothing to fear but fear itself embodied in a bat. It is a particularly powerful moment in the comic and striking with its shining golden colors in a book of 

drab prison walls. 

The boy earns his name as the bane of existence for the cruel warden who fed his mother's corpse to the sharks rather than provide for her burial and commits his first murder as a mere child, 13 pages into the story. Following this crime, he's thrown into the Cavidad Oscuro for a decade. In this pit, he fights the tide daily and is forced to eat rats and fish to survive. He emerges from the pit a man and a legend to the prison. His cowardice exceeding his cruelty, the warden essentially leaves Bane to his own devices as he becomes lord over the prisoners. Consuming books from the library left behind by the priests who came to the island and practicing meditation for hours at a time, Bane goes on to build his mind as well as his body. 

After several weaker prisoners are killed in an ongoing military medical experiment, Bane is volunteered by the warden to become its new subject. Pumped full of the super steroid Venom and implanted with a mechanism to feed it directly into his system, Bane is the first success of this grueling experiment. Having reached a pinnacle of mental and physical achievement, Bane decides to act. In a feat that rivals his eventual foe, Bane slows his vital signs to the point where he appears dead. Taking this as yet another failure, the scientists turn over his body to be fed to the sharks. Yet Bane lives. Reader, do you know how cool it is to see a super genius steroid lucha fighting sharks? It's very cool.

Bane returns to kidnap the warden and free three men who've pledged themselves to him: Bird, the man who has provided everything he knows about Gotham, Trogg, a weapons expert and lifer of the prison, and Zombie, the infirmary trustee who has replicated Venom. Leaving the island via helicopter, Bane gains revenge for his mother by hurling the warden to the sharks. Heading north, the crew arrives in Gotham to scout and plot the eventual takeover. Bane's strategy is to observe the one man who stands in his way: Batman. Murdering a small time gang who, in a nice touch, resemble the Three Stooges, Bane makes his presence known to the hero before disappearing in the shadows.

Next time: Batman #491