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Spoilers for “Absolute Batman” follow.
The electrifying first arc of Scott Snyder and Nick Dragotta’s “Absolute Batman” comic ended on a positive enough note. Batman, with the help of his friends, managed to defeat Roman Sionis/Black Mask and his Party Animals gang, who were besieging Gotham City. But Sionis was just a small fish in a big pond… and so too is Batman. This Bruce Wayne is a working class city engineer. He’s got the strength and intelligence of his classic self, but not the easy-to-come-by resources.
At the end of “Absolute Batman” #6, Sionis’ master — a mirthless billionaire serial killer ironically called “the Joker” — has seen his plans for Gotham hit a speed bump. His bat problem has proven to be no laughing matter, so he’s going to send in a more serious exterminator. The Joker ends the issue with two words that send dread through the body of every Bat-fan reading: “Get Bane.”
Bane is easy to mock when you’ve only got Tom Hardy’s cheery-voiced Bane in “The Dark Knight Rises” in mind. Lest we forget, though, he is the man who broke the Bat (in the “Knightfall” comic storyline). And that’s just the classic Bane — how monstrous could he be in the twisted Absolute universe? Quite, it turns out.
This Bane stands about nine feet tall when he’s not using his Venom steroid, and can buff up to the size of a small building when he is. In “Absolute Batman” #9, Bane broke Batman without exerting the slightest effort or losing any bit of his calm. In “Absolute Batman” #10 he plays prison guard, keeping Bruce locked up for months in the Joker’s “Ark M” house of horrors and mad science. Now, “Absolute Batman” #11 (drawn by fill-in artist Clay Mann) debuts the origin of Absolute Bane.
“Absolute Batman” hasn’t been shy about drastically changing Batman staples, from rewriting Bruce Wayne’s origin story to revamping Mr. Freeze into a lanky and ghoulish ice monster. Bane, though, has been pretty classic. He’s got the skull-like luchador mask, green Venom tubes affixed to his head and arms, etc. His origin, too, is pulled right out of Bane’s debut comic: 1993’s “Vengeance of Bane” by writer Chuck Dixon and artist Graham Nolan.
Like his original self, Absolute Bane hails from the fictional South American country Santa Prisca, where he was raised in the prison Peña Duro for the sins of his revolutionary father. Inside, he endured and became a monster of a man. Snyder, though, recontextualizes Bane’s history into that of this new world, molding him into a mirror image of what Batman might become.