Bane fell into disuse for several years, probably due to a terrible arc that ran in Gotham Knights for what seemed like a decade but was actually only five or six issues. It had Bane announcing that his father (you know, the notorious Santa Priscan criminal) was Thomas Wayne and that he and Batman were, in fact, half-brothers. Surprisingly, everybody was OK with this and Bane became Batman’s partner. This lasted until Bane found out he was deceived. (Which, first, was obvious to anybody who’d read any Batman story ever, and second, is a willful deception that didn’t benefit anybody. I still can’t figure out what anybody had to gain by lying to Bane about his parentage, and the story skipped over things like “motive”.) It was pretty dire, and Bane faded away for a while.
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.