The circumstances you’re born into always become an essential part of who—and, as is the case with Absolute Bane—what you are. Regardless of how far you run from them or how hard you fight to change them, the circumstances of your birth, your upbringing, or the world you were brought into is where you started. As you develop your own identity, you gain the autonomy to shape yourself into the person you want to become. If you are born into war, you can choose to fight for freedom; and if you fight long enough, you can make the world better. You can soar above and escape from the fighting.
Others born into war may never wash themselves clean of the baptism of blood they were born into. Some birds are meant to pick the flesh off corpses. Absolute Bane is a bird of war, blood-stained by his own volition.
Absolute Batman #11 from Scott Snyder, Clay Mann, Ivan Plascencia, and Clayton Cowles peels back the face of Bane to show what created the monster that annihilated the Batman.
Born Amid the Fighting
The story begins on an island called Santa Prisca. A baby is born into a world of bloodshed and fighting. There has always been fighting on Santa Prisca. Bane’s father is a rebel leader, as his own father was, and his father’s father before that. Their group of freedom fighters, called Cielos Libres, has been in this endless cycle of war for more than 100 years in a bid for freedom.
The entirety of Bane’s childhood is summed up in a single page of grit-washed battle defined by Mann’s art. Every panel further breaks down the morals that Bane’s father tried to instill in him of fighting for his people’s freedoms. Those same values, passed onto Bane by his father, led Bane into the same cycle of war his grandfather had been stuck in, like men passing a torch. Bane stands by his father’s side as his right hand and enforcer for nearly his entire life. A weapon in his father’s holster to be aimed at the enemies of Santa Prisca.
To me, the character of Bane has always seemed to have a less refined motivation. Yet, with that single page, I am given an entire history of Santa Prisca to follow the cyclical nature of oppression and those who seize the tools to oppose it. Santa Prisca is now a place I feel connected to because I want no one to be exploited by outsiders for their resources or by their own government. Bane spends his entire life fighting among people who lay down their lives for the land they love as much as he does. As much as his father does. And as much as his grandfather did. But when does it end? What must change for these men to make a breakthrough, for their war to finally come to an end, for Santa Prisca to know peace?
There is no mention of Bane’s mother at his birth. He’s just a baby, alone, drenched in red by colorist Plascenica. There is one singular voice guiding Bane into war. A man whose true beliefs do not appear to Bane as hard as he tries. All the rebels we see are men. There are only archetypically masculine figures in Bane’s life to mold him. There is no feminine energy nor gentle voice to dissuade away from the clear choice of violence.
For Bane, there was never a choice beyond fighting. His home is rich with the things that the world at large wants. What those in power want, they take. In Santa Prisca’s case, the rebels have pushed back the Spanish, the French, and the Dutch, who laid claim to their home. They were much stronger nations who had the belief that believed they could take the island’s natural resources because of the power they held. It is something he is taught from a young age. With his father’s guiding philosophies, Bane only knows how to face the world with a closed fist. To meet the world with violence is the language of man.
Despite being trained to combat it his entire life, Bane is still crushed by the repeated cycle of war, rebellion, and bloodshed.
Peace Will Be Won
The surviving members of Cielos Libres are sentenced to life in Peña Duro prison, where the cells flood with the cold tides every night, forcing the inmates to fight for pockets of air amid the dead being swept in and out of the cells. Bane learns to sleep hanging from the top of his cell and survives by eating rats. But his father is filled with hope.
Peace will be won. They will never break us.
The rebel group’s flag depicts Santa Prisca’s national bird, the Quetzal, a species that dies if held in captivity. When Bane was a boy, his father told him that when they won peace, the Quetzal would fly free. But Bane never could see the same vision of the bird of freedom as his father. The hope of a soaring freedom that filled Bane’s father in prison isn’t the same as that which fueled his own heart.
In the world of Absolute, which is built around extremes in every sense of the word, it is strange to see a symbol like the Quetzal at first, especially because Bane later describes it as weak upon seeing a photo of it while in prison. Weakness is something that is crushed in the Absolute universe by the horrors that have come to exist. Readers know this from the previous 10 issues, but from the crushing nature of the universe itself, specks of hope can be formed: the hope that Santa Prisca can soar free from its oppressors, as they have been fighting for. But Bane cannot see that bird soaring free in his imagination. Not even as a child or with the help of mind-altering substances. His mind cannot conjure a gentle freedom. There is no freedom in the Absolute universe that comes from a gentle hand.
After 11 years of survival in the prison, Bane leads the remaining rebels to freedom using crude weapons and pure strength. The birds of Santa Prisca see the skies for the first time in 11 years. His father gives Bane a mask made from the flag. The white Quetzal in his heart, the bird he sees in his son as the saviour they have been waiting for. Bane is the symbol of Christ in many ways for the people of Santa Prisca. As Jesus was tempted by Satan, so too shall Bane be given a choice.
A man in white stands waiting for them in the sunshine. The Devil waits upon the shores to make Christ an offer. The Devil, in our case, is The Joker. They speak and something is exchanged, which we do not yet know. But the man is off, and Bane faces his father, who has never felt such deep love for his son.
Can you see it, Father? Your dream of peace?
There is a panel of young Bane hugging his father. Then, Bane’s father responds to his question about seeing his dream of peace by telling his son that he sees it in him. After the answer is heard, Bane kills his father, whom he has stood by his entire life, in the embrace of his son’s arms. Those are his final words before there is only one bird soaring free on Santa Prisca.
A bird of War.
All Life is a War Story
Those who are born in blood are sometimes cursed to always be stained by it. Our first depiction of Bane in his life is of him as a baby, roughly penciled. The baby has a purposeful, almost sketch-like nature. Mann’s typical figure illustrations are among the most anatomically detailed in the industry, so the unrefined nature of the baby caught my eye for a moment and forced me to really consider how they were trying to portray Bane. Bane is unrefined upon his birth. We know what he will become, we know his path, and we know the monster he becomes. But monsters aren’t born, they are made. They are molded by the world around them.
Absolute Bane #11 relies heavily on the use of the color red for the thematic element of war. Bane is war. He was born on a battlefield. In each panel about his upbringing, he is depicted in red. There is a rage inside him that has yet to be stoked by years in prison, fighting just to survive. With a father who kept himself alive with the hope of a bird that Bane sees as weak. Still, he serves his father. War needs a master. War needs a reason. Something to fight for.
Joker gives Bane something that refines him into a focused force of will. With one placement of his hand, Bane has been changed. When Bane’s father tells him he sees the dream of peace in his son, all the red is brought to the eyes of his mask. It is the signature look we expect from Bane. The death of the boy who wanted to know what his father saw
The birth of a monster, of Bane, of War.
Peace? Peace is death. War is life. So look up, Bruce. What do you see? Because it isn’t a bat.