Cad Bane is a Duros bounty hunter from the planet Duro, created by George Lucas, Dave Filoni and Henry Gilroy for Star Wars: The Clone Wars and introduced in the first-season finale "Hostage Crisis" (2009). Corey Burton voices him. StarWars.com calls him "the preeminent blaster-for-hire in the galaxy at the time of the Clone Wars and after the conflict ended".
Built from westerns, deliberately
The design is unusually literal about its sources: the wide brim, the duster, the flat delivery and the deliberate stillness are lifted from Lee Van Cleef. It works because everything around him is a war serial. Bane does not fight like a soldier or a Jedi — he arrives, he prices the job, he leaves. He is the first character of the animated era permitted to be simply better at his work than the protagonists.
The client list is the character
Across five seasons he takes contracts from Darth Sidious, Count Dooku, the Hutt Council, the Kaminoans and eventually the Empire. He steals a holocron out of the Jedi Temple. He takes the Senate building hostage on Coruscant with a crew including Aurra Sing. He kidnaps Force-sensitive infants to order. No other recurring figure in The Clone Wars works for that many masters, and the show uses him to prove the war has a functioning private sector.
After the Republic
The Bad Batch brings him back to hunt the clone girl Omega and to collect Force-sensitive children for the Empire — the same job, a different employer, which is exactly the point. The Clone Wars' later seasons also establish him as the man who trained a young Boba Fett, giving canon something close to a bounty-hunting lineage.
Live action
The Book of Boba Fett (2022) puts him on screen in the flesh, performed by Dorian Kingi with Corey Burton still supplying the voice, working for the Pyke Syndicate. He shoots Cobb Vanth in the street and then faces Fett in a straight quick-draw duel that the series stages, without embarrassment, as a western.
Why he matters
Because he is the proof that the animated shows could invent a top-tier antagonist from nothing. Bane was not in a film and was not adapted from Legends, and he has still become the default answer to "who is the galaxy's best bounty hunter" for a whole generation of the audience.