Last week Warner Bros. announced that Tom Hardy will be playing Bane in The Dark Knight Rises. Comic book fans know this villain well, but others may be thinking to themselves, “who is Bane?”. Luckily, PopcornBiz posted a great interview with Chuck Dixon, the man who co-created Bane back in 1993. Here are some key excerpts from the interview:
Bane came to being as a result of a multi-creator storyline called “Knightfall” in which, to facilitate a new, darker hero taking on the cowl, Batman would have his back broken by a major new enemy created just for the occasion. Among the editorial team Dixon in particular was concerned that the newbie baddie be well-received by readers.
“If we failed in creating this new villain it was going to seem like a lame stunt,” he recalls. “I argued that it’s nearly impossible to create a character to be popular. Comic book characters who become popular tend to be almost created by mistake: One-off characters like Wolverine, who’s now iconic, or the Silver Surfer, who was created just to be a friend for Galactus.” Thus legendary Batman editor Dennis O’Neill charged Dixon and [artist, Graham Nolan] with creating a compelling origin for the villain in a one-shot special titled “Batman: Vengeance of Bane.”
“The parameters for him had to be that he must be the intellectual and physical equal of Batman, that it would be believable that he could beat Batman and injure him badly enough to put him out of action for a year,” he says. “He is in every way a self-made man, just as Bruce Wayne made himself into Batman. Bane made himself into Bane, but with much darker purposes.”
“We created a backstory for him where you had a little bit of sympathy for him because his circumstances were so lousy: Bane basically grew up in prison serving his father’s life sentence in some Central American hellhole,” says Dixon of the initially nameless character who uses cunning and brute strength to escape his prison home, arrive in Gotham and pump up his physique with Venom, a steroid once used and rejected by Batman after it made him a hyper-aggressive, nearly insane addict – Venom quickly unbalances the driven Bane as well. “It’s always good to have a little sympathy for the bad guy if you want him to stick in the public’s mind.”
Don’t expect to get the same brainless Bane we saw in Joel Schumacher’s Batman & Robin. Dixon says he’s quite confident we’ll see something closer to the villain that he created for the comics. Hit up the source link below to read more about Bane and to check out the entire interview.
SOURCE: PopcornBiz
