[9][10] As a small child, Brian and his two sisters, Elaine and Susan and their Mother were physically and mentally abused by their violent alcoholic father.

[11] As an adult, Brian married a woman named Rebecca, earned his PhD in physics and found a job in Los Alamos, New Mexico working for the United States government on a project developing a clean way to create nuclear energy.

While drunk at work one day, Brian accidentally overloaded some machinery, causing an explosion that cost him his job.

Brian believed Bruce had inherited both the "monster gene" and genetic defects due to the accident in Los Alamos, so he ignored him completely and attempted to keep Rebecca away from him.

When Bruce woke up one Christmas morning and opened a present from his mother, a complex model, he assembled it easily despite his young age.

[14] Brian escaped conviction due to lack of evidence, but soon afterwards is arrested again when he drunkenly boasted about beating the law by bullying his son.

He eventually stood up to his father, attacking and strangling him before being returned to Earth by an image of his wife, Betty Ross.

When Bruce began to suffer from ALS, Mister Fantastic collected DNA from Brian Banner's corpse to cure him.

Recently, Bruce has implied that killing his father was not actually an accident, noting during a confrontation with Daken and Wolverine that he has managed to avoid causing any innocent deaths when he is rampaging as the Hulk—save for those occasions when he is under the control or influence of something else—and suggesting that it is unlikely that he would make such a 'mistake' in his more limited human form.

[20] During the "Chaos War" storyline, Brian Banner is temporarily resurrected after Death flees her realm, and transforms into a Guilt Hulk/Devil Hulk hybrid.