CoooooooOOOOOOOOooooon – QUEEEEEEST! That Patti Page was something, eh? Unlike Bane: Conquest which is decidedly not - unless that something is a pile of poo!
Bane suddenly discovers the existence of a secret global criminal organisation - that’s definitely not a rip-off of Marvel’s HYDRA - called Kobra that he decides on a whim that he wants to run. Cue page after page of dumb, meandering action as he moronically and repetitively battles these chowderheads: go to this country, fight, go to another country, fight, here’s Batpants, fight, here’s Catwoman, fight, how many more issues to go, fight, twelve fucking issues are you kidding me, fight. It’s so one-note to read and never got interesting.
Bane here is a bland cartoon character – just your average tough guy struggling to find a personality – while his goons are even worse: some dude called Zombie, another who looks vaguely caveman-ish, a blond guy; they’re so flat and forgettable. The most laughable was Dionysus, aka the poor man’s MODOK. What an imagination old Chuck Dixon has, eh? “What’s this – ‘Marvel’? Oh, they’ve got much better shit than DC – I’ll just copy them!”
Speaking of laughable, Dixon giving a young Bane an actual teddy bear to cuddle in Santa Prisca was as hackneyed a trope as I’ve ever seen in anything. “Hmm, how do I represent Bane’s lost innocence and youth? Duur, teddy bear! Never mind how unlikely and out of place it seems!” I did genuinely laugh at Graham Nolan’s awful art though – he gives Bane the hairiest shoulders! Anyone remember The Legion of Doom from WWF? It’s like their shoulder pads but with hair in place of plastic spikes!
I’d hoped that Dixon (who, along with Nolan, are two of Bane’s three creators, the other being Doug “The Most ‘90s Batman Writer Ever” Moench) might’ve written a decent Bane comic – he has managed it before in the collection, Batman vs Bane – but, no, Bane: Conquest is unfortunately as cheesy, aimless and dumb as the majority of his comics. I’d rec Batman vs Bane or, even better, Tom King’s Batman/Bane books (King’s characterisation of Bane is vastly superior to anything Dixon ever dreamt up) over this much too long, tedious nonsense.
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