THE DARK KNIGHT RISES Spoilers(?): What Bane Was Built To Do

Comics industry rumor site Bleeding Cool is reporting that anonymous sources close to Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight will use Bane in–well, in just the way most viewers expect it to. The South American political prisoner-turned-Gotham crime boss will reportedly break Batman’s back in the film, rendering Bruce Wayne at least temporarily paralyzed, just as he did in the ’90s classic Batman #497, the culminating chapter of the epic Knightfall storyline.According to Bleeding Cool, the sources inside the film mostly feel like it’s almost not a spoiler, and are incredulous at speculation that the incident–which defined Bane’s character for more than a decade before he became much more fleshed out during a recent fan-favorite run of Secret Six–wouldn’t happen in the film. The rumor site headlines the story as “Hardly a Spoiler,” although (like ComicBook.com), they took pains not to reveal it in the headline, a formality which some sites are already foregoing.First appearing in his own one-shot in the early ’90s, Bane came to prominence as a Batman villain when, at the end of Knightfall, he was able to defeat Batman, leaving him paralyzed and setting the stage for a temporary, violent and wildly unpopular substitute Batman in the form of Jean-Paul Valley, then-recently introduced as the character Azrael in yet another miniseries. The Batman titles in the early ’90s felt a little like Marvel’s entire publishing line lately–every event led to another event, led to another. The plan in Knightfall, though, was somewhat ingenious: Bane understood that Batman’s “wonderful toys” meant somebody fairly wealthy had to be the Dark Knight, so he let all the inmates out of Arkham and then, in the chaos