10 Things DC Comics Wants You To Forget About Bane

9. That He's Super Smart

Which is a shame, because as we say, it's got nothing in common with any other incarnation of the character. In fact Tom Hardy's Bane is much closer to how he originally appears in the comic books, where his huge, buff bod is almost secondary to his huge, buff brain. Antonio Diego may have had to learn how to defend himself whilst growing up in the vicious Peña Dura prison, but just as important was figuring out how to manipulate his fellow inmates and eventually engineer his escape from the maximum security facility and chase down the tricksy bat who had been haunting his dreams (yes, that is why Bane ends up in Gotham and yes, that is pretty silly in itself). In fact, creator Chuck Dixon compares Bane to Bruce Lee. He's not a big, lumbering hunk of muscles that just obliterates everything in his way. He's an intellectual, a master strategist you can put highly complex plans into action and actually pull them off - like breaking Batman's spine and conquering his city - which he does by entering a deep form of meditation. It's even implied that all this hippie guff gives Bane an extra edge during battle, that his mindfulness makes "time and space playthings to him". Anyway, all the cod-spirituality aside, he's also a leading expert in a number of scientific fields, is fluent in eight languages (two of them being dead ones), and figured out Batman's secret identity in just a year. Others have been it at it for decades and never even come close. Nowadays though, it's still the "physical threat" angle of Bane that gets used, as he continues to act more as a heavy for the A-list supervillains in big crossover events like Forever Evil. Look at him, brain the size of a planet and they ask him to push over buildings...