10 Characters Who Have Defeated Bane

Bane, the man who 'breaks people' in the DC comics. Whether he's hopped up on the drug Venom or not, he's a brilliant and imposing figure.

Assuming Joel Schumacher isn't involved, anyway.

A recurring villain, he first originated in Batman: Vengeance of Bane #1 (1993). Bane was born the son of an imprisoned revolutionary within the fictional Caribbean island nation of Santa Prisca, a corrupt dictatorship. The cruel government decides that child Bane must live out his escaped father's prison sentence, leaving him to grow up in the prison, Peña Duro (literally Hard Rock in Spanish), carrying around a teddy bear that he uses to conceal a knife.

Bane has a genius IQ and can speak a handful of languages, as well as being in peak physical condition, and having mastered several forms of hand-to-hand combat, he eventually becomes a 'King' of Peña Duro - something that catches the warden's attention. Desiring to break the so-called king, Bane is tortured and subjected to an experimental new drug called Venom.

While it has debilitating addictive properties with severe withdrawal symptoms, Venom increases the user's physical capabilities exponentially, giving Bane superhuman strength.

He uses said to strength to, well, break stuff, but not all things go his way.

Technically the first person to defeat Bane. After the big villain traps an exhausted Batman and fractures the hero's spine, paralyzing him, Azrael takes up the mantle. Being an anti-hero, Azrael begins a brutal vigilante spree across Gotham.

Azrael fights Bane a first time and, though he loses, manages to cause some pretty serious wounds on the humongous villain - ones he cannot quickly recover from. Finally, Azrael challenges Bane to a second fight in a more advanced, reinforced Batsuit and defeats him by cutting off his venom supply with a flying razor blade from his suit.

By this point, Azrael is starting to succumb to his bloodlust and begins torturing the helpless Bane while Robin and Commissioner Gordon can only look on in horror.

Defeated and broken, Bane begs for Azrael to kill him and put him out of his misery. Azrael finally relents and spares the villain in the end, but Bane has already set off a chain of events that will force Bruce Wayne and Azrael to fight for control over the Batman persona in the future.