There’s more to the Azrael story, but it doesn’t have much to do with Bane. Basically, Bruce Wayne was healed through ninja magic (which nobody involved with Batman will ever reference again), and when Azrael crossed the line by killing an enemy, Bruce returned and took back the mantle of Batman. Aside from some of the silliness, Knightfall is actually quite good, and the Bat-books did something really clever. The trend at the time was to make the heroes darker. Wolverine, the Punisher, and Spawn were the big sellers, and so many other DC books tried to emulate the psychopaths. What Knightfall did was to present a darker take on Batman, to present a Batman who’d slaughter his enemies, and then restore the real Batman after people realized that they didn’t actually want a Punisher-style Batman. Knightfall is Batman calling out what was wrong with superheroes in the 90s.
My favorite part of this was that Bane was in prison serving his father’s life sentence.
That never fails to crack me up – it’s a pretty sweet system of criminal justice. “Man, that guy’s hard to catch. Wait, he’s got a kid? Let’s just lock him up. You want to get a sandwich?”
In a way, it makes SOME sense. Maybe his parental guilt would lead him to turn himself in.