By now, all of you are aware of the fact that Tom Hardy has agreed to portray Batman's villainous enemy Bane in
The Dark Knight Rises. POPCORNBIZ recently sat down with comic writer Chuck Dixon to get his feelings on the character Bane who he co-created with Graham Nolon, appearing on screen yet again.
On hearing Bane would appear in The Dark Knight Rises...
“The crowning achievement of all my work is definitely Bane. Graham called me yesterday morning. I had no clue. He said he'd just read it on the Internet. We were both as giddy as schoolgirls that Bane is going to get another shot at cinema stardom.”
On creating Bane..
“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 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.”
On Bane's first and last movie appearance in Batman and Robin..
“He was handled poorly in a movie that was lousy. Bane was a thug. He only had a couple of lines – and I wouldn't even call it dialogue.”