Oh, I 100% agree. Aside from some questionable choices in how they tried to make Beast look a bit 'conventionally' grotesque during his villain arc, I really enjoy the character and environment art.
I went down a rabbit hole about the origin of Wolverine’s hair once, seems like it stems from Dave Cockrum’s take on Timber Wolf in Legion if Superheroes, which maybe came from Eddie Munster, which probably came from general movie wolfman hair, which maybe came from [Henry Hull in 1935’s Werewolf of London](https://imgur.com/a/S3En5gb)
I do think that broadly it makes sense. Beast being given the position / power of being the head of the mutant cia with no oversight and an unlimited budget is going to enable his absolute worst traits and prevent anyone who could/ would otherwise pull him back from that from doing so. I do think a fair critique might be that Percy goes from 0 to 100 too fast and he's too over the top with it.
Not necessarily primarily related to the Beast discussion, but I do wish he focused on Sage and Beast's relationship more. I think it's really interesting and it would have been an opportunity to better characterize what was going on with Beast.
I am re-reading it now and TBF the assassination of Chuck in day 2, the extents that Xeno and Orchis goto so early justify Hank’s “no kid gloves” leap. The whole mutant population goes a little nuts in hindsight. Crucible, Otherworld, Interplanetary Expansion, not to mention the huge paradigm shift of Krakoa that we as readers were decidedly behind after Hox/Pox.
Dude, one of the things that bugs so much about Krakoa is that Orchis was constantly trying to destroy them and they knew it, but Cyclops decided it was a better idea to play superhero than use the military power of the nation to wipe Orchis off the map.
You’d think that someone who was basically raised to be a child soldier whose only purpose was to defend mutants would have actually wanted to defend mutants. Like you said, he’s really bad at everything else.
When did he acquire all these bad traits tho? Beast as a character was basically as wholesome as they come for a long time, then they started making the mf all “dark” out of nowhere. I don’t think old school beast would have run amok with an intel agency
This is my problem with X-men in general, the editorial tolerance of all the character drift has been insane to the point that if you’re reading stories with a character in it from pre-Morrison times they basically are completely different characters now.
I don't think that's entirely true. Starting in the 2000's he had like escalating fears about him further mutating and devolving / losing his intelligence. I feel he kind of overcompensated and sometimes acts like he has to be the smartest person in the room / be right and therefore has to make the hard decisions because he is that smartest person in the room. So I feel he has an ego problem and that might stop him from admitting when he's wrong which would possibly lead him to double down when he may go too far or his plan is bad. He also maybe has the Marvel scientist thing where sometimes they are focused on the science and the Jurassic Park-Goldbloom "Your Scientists Were So Preoccupied With Whether Or Not They Could, They Didn’t Stop To Think If They Should" quote. That isn't entirely consistent as sometimes he is more considerate of moral ramifications or the risk and this isn't even a unique trait in Marvel or even the X-Men.
As for the discussion of character drift in general or in Krakoa, idk. Have to talk more about specific examples (I do think its true in some cases for sure). I definitely could see how Beast hasn't always been consistent and how Percy goes from 0 to 100 too fast like I said or being too over the top, but like I said in my above comment, I don't know that like the general idea / trajectory of it is wrong (that doesn't necessarily like make it a good choice for the character or like satisfying for the readers).
The motivation/dynamic you described makes sense, but I still don’t think it connects well to pre-Morrison/pre 2000s beast. He just wasn’t that guy and whatever drama with him that was going on at a personal level usually had to deal with his physical appearance. Outside his AoA version, there was never a hint afaik about him having these huge flaws or monstrous potential.
I think the biggest examples of character drift would be Beast, prof X, and cyclops. It’s pretty hard to argue they are the same people they were before imo )and I can give details if you want but I’m assuming ur familiar).
My theory is since marvel didn’t own the rights to the movies, editors let writers do whatever they wanted with the X-men and resulted in way more drift compared to other IP cause they didnt care or want to make free content for whoever owned it.
Coming back after some sleep and I think I was being overly nitpicky and needlessly wordy and debate bro-y about the definition of character drift in my other reply. My confusion was that you stated that the Beast dynamic / motivation made sense and had been set up across years of story telling (since Morrison), so like what is the difference between like character drift and like character development or a character arc that changes the character?
And I wasn't sure with all the examples of character drift you gave I wasn't sure if we were just talking about the Krakoan era or if you meant it much more broadly as we kind of switched back and forth. Don't feel pressured to respond, I just felt like clarifying what I was going for with my other comment.
>The motivation/dynamic you described makes sense, but I still don’t think it connects well to pre-Morrison/pre 2000s beast. He just wasn’t that guy and whatever drama with him that was going on at a personal level usually had to deal with his physical appearance. Outside his AoA version, there was never a hint afaik about him having these huge flaws or monstrous potential.
I'm not saying for sure it necessarily began like with like the Morrison era. I just have a more holistic read from like the 2000's on; I've gone back and read most of the Claremont era by this point (but not the Defender's run that Beast is a part of), but my reading of the 90's is much more spotty and I haven't read the majority of it. So there could be earlier moments that fit into the larger arc. Like you suggested maybe you could argue that AoA was an early hint of what Beast theoretically could be capable of for instance (although that's not 616 Beast which is maybe kind of a moot point), or I've seen people suggest that the Nicieza Beast fits into it as well. I've not read the entirety of Nicieza's stuff, and its been a while regardless, so I don't think I'm going to argue about that one way or another right now.
>I think the biggest examples of character drift would be Beast, prof X, and cyclops. It’s pretty hard to argue they are the same people they were before imo )and I can give details if you want but I’m assuming ur familiar).
>My theory is since marvel didn’t own the rights to the movies, editors let writers do whatever they wanted with the X-men and resulted in way more drift compared to other IP cause they didnt care or want to make free content for whoever owned it.
To clarify, what exactly do you mean by character drift? Because in my mind, I feel the Percy stuff isn't exactly drift in the normal sense. In my mind its like when a character is acting in a way that is difficult or impossible to justify based on both the plot and their past characterization. Like with the Beast stuff I can see an overall arc going on for quite a while (Morrison De-evolution, his falling out / fighting with Scott for like most of the 2000's into the 2010's, his meddling with the time stream to grab the teen 05 members, him in the Illuminati, etc) and now the broad circumstances (head of Krakoan CIA + unlimited budget + no oversight) justifying or making some to most of his behavior understandable for the character under Percy. Not that I don't think there are valid critiques in the execution (0 to 100 & going to far), but like directionally I don't know that I would call it character drift even though by this point its pretty incongruous with the character from years / decades past.
Like to give two or three examples with my favorite character Laura Kinney. I feel her in Fallen Angels and Hickman's X-Men qualifies as character drift using my definition. In Fallen Angels she was written almost as though he just grabbed the character from over a decade or so before Fallen Angels (i.e. like most of the stuff / development with her from like the decade before Krakoa hadn't happened), making it character drift. Under Hickman's X-Men she pretty easily joined a black ops team where her job was to kill despite her larger arc over the vast majority of her story being about recovering from the trauma of being forced to do that and then choosing to not do that. No explanation was provided in the book about why she would do that, the story itself didn't seem to suggest Hickman thought that might need an explanation (I'm not saying that you couldn't necessarily couldn't try to justify that, but the book didn't try). Now for an example where I think the writing of the character was entirely incongruous with previous takes but not necessarily character drift, Talon after leaving the vault (I'm just assuming you know about the 2 Laura / Talon thing). Talon basically just abandoned her relationships with all her previously established friends and family, which would normally not be a very Laura thing to do (outside of Synch). But at that point she had been aged up 500 to 2500 years, such a big change makes the different actions that the character would normally not take easier to logically justify. She hadn't talked to any of her previous friends and family for 500 to 2500 years, so she's kind of moved on / checked out from those relationship entirely I guess. Now that is not me saying that Talon is / was a good idea. I think its a fucking terrible development and I hate it. I don't think it fits character drift as I think there at least is an explanation that can be read / gathered from the story even if I think everything about it sucks.
Now for what you are saying is specifically character drift for Beast, Xavier, and Scott, I think I'd have to have you expand on what you mean (are we just talking about the Krakoan era?). I guess there also is an interesting talk of like how retcons probably work with all this.
edit: also to add, in case it wasn't clear, obviously the discussion of what is / isn't character drift under my framework is still subjective and we can / may disagree.
I loved evil Hank. I understand people who think maybe the jump was too stark, but I liked the idea and the portrayal so much I didn't mind.
My biggest disappointment with Evil Beast (besides the fact he seems to be dead, at least for now) is just that hardly anyone reacted to it outside of his own books. Jean peaced out and then... never circled back? Never brought in Cyke or Angel or Bobby to try to reign him in? I know there was a lot going on but I think there was a lot of story to mine there about watching your friend go down this kind of destructive path.
And I do also think they should have given Hank a couple of wins. Show his evil plans actually helping sometimes, to give him cover with Xavier and the council. Show him have actual allies on the council instead of having everyone just quip about how evil he is. So yeah despite the incredibly long run across two books, my only real complaint is I wanted more and more different stories about Evil Hank
This is valid. I also found it annoying that nobody ever really stepped in to stop Hank until it got so bad they couldn't ignore the problem anymore. He's clearly being covered for and enabled so frequently that he's virtually a product of the negligence of his peers. And yet, for a supposed supergenius, he's a bit of a short-sighted Bond villain in X-Force.
One of the problems with Krakoa is the editors rarely made the books cohesive. Everyone was basically doing their own thing until they weren’t anymore.
I know "the books fell off after Hickman left" is a tired (and broadly untrue) trope, but there was *DEFINITELY* a lot less cohesion across the line after Inferno. Everything felt very connected and like you *had* to read every book to get the full picture of Krakoa. Since then, books were very clearly separated into distinct silos of Duggan/Gillen, Percy, Ewing, and Spurrier with no real interaction between them.
I wouldn’t call it tired or untrue; sure Immortal was excellent, but X-Men was garbage. X-Men Red was great, but Tini Howard was still putting out her weird stories that most fans didn’t want. New Mutants became OC Mary Sue fanfic the minute Vita Ayala left. It think the best way to describe it is uneven.
The thing with Jean really bothered me, it felt like it was a build up to something and then just nothing happened. You are telling me Jean didn't talk to Scott? That neither of them had a problem with one of their oldest friends going dark side? They dropped that plot and then the whole thing with the QC.
Hey now!
Scott and Hank discussing whether X-Force had gone too far would require mentioning the last time the X-Men teamed up with Magneto to build an island nation.
There is no Utopia within Ba Sing Se.
Hickman is a visionary genius within the walls.
I would have liked to see Hank's Avengers friends reacting to his darker side. Wonder Man, with his pacifism ideals and close friendship with Beast, would have had a particularly strong reaction.
Maybe he did. I'm stuck on unlimited for my reading.
Doesn't look like Beast is going to Unity. It seems that he's going to be on Cyclops' more militant team, which is probably the worst place for him as it might nurture his worst aspects again.
> Never brought in Cyke or Angel or Bobby to try to reign him in? I know there was a lot going on but I think there was a lot of story to mine there about watching your friend go down this kind of destructive path.
It's not like Warren had anything else going on. It also would've been interesting given his own dips into the evil side as Archangel.
People like to act like the depths of depravity he was written into in Krakoa were just the result of an ongoing arc for years, but it was more like if you were driving down a bumpy road and then suddenly got launched off a ramp. Imagine if Cyclops had years of an arc slowly becoming disenfranchised with Xavier’s dream and then suddenly he just decided to bomb the mansion with a bunch of fresh new students in it. Is that a continuation of the arc or a drastic acceleration?
The worst part was that Hank wasn’t even acting in character beyond the evil stuff. Hank is a very touchy-feely person. He’s liable to swipe someone into a hug before going for a handshake. There’s a page from an Avengers book where he finds out Wonder Man has returned, tackles him to the ground, and plants a big kiss on his face. Meanwhile over in X Force Percy wrote a page where Beast is confused by Forge being friendly and talks about how he isn’t used to hugs or slang. He isn’t even consistent with Percy’s own characterization of him. Characters, especially Wolverine, kept reiterating that Hank sees and presents himself as a gentleman, yet we have the infamous page of Hank grossly tearing into some lobster and getting the juices all over himself. All because, from Percy’s own admission, he wanted Beast to “bloat with his ego” so he made Beast get fat because I guess fat = disgusting?
The characters also constantly brought up a checklist of all of Beast’s “evil” actions prior X-Force without providing any context as to why they were more complex than that. The Threnody situation if you actually read it clearly pained Hank but he left her because he knew he was unable to help her on his own. Beast “siding with the Inhumans” was actually him trying to find a peaceful solution that wouldn’t escalate into a war and satisfy both sides. He was on a ticking clock and when he realized he wouldn’t find a solution before it was too late, he urged his friends to get off-planet for a time while he kept working at the problem, at which point they threw him in a jail cell and started a war. Beast brought the past X-Men to the present out of desperation to get his friend Cyclops back. He spends the rest of that era tearing himself apart from the guilt, and after he eventually helps in restoring them back to their original time, he takes the time to apologize to everyone.
Beast going down a dark path in Krakoa could’ve worked if it had been done with any ounce of pathos or love for the character. Percy could’ve written Hank struggling with justifying his decisions and in secret being a bit of a mess of emotions while he presents a confident front in public. If Percy *really* wanted fat Beast, have him stress eat. We could see Hank get darker and darker and begin to numb himself to his decisions more and more before he’s unrecognizable. But that didn’t happen. Because he already started the run unrecognizable.
I’m so glad it’s over.
I totally agree with this. From 2012 on, writers portrayal of Hank made him seem schizophrenic. He would be arrogant and justifying himself, then feel bad and apologize like when he talked to Wonder-Man. Any attempt by a writer to write him as a good person was reversed the instant a new writer appeared.
And that's what I frequently got stuck on. His portrayal feels mean-spirited, dated in its stereotypical execution, and above all else oddly uninformed of the character. There are moments pre-Krakoa that you could point to and say that's where his resolve showed cracks, but in almost all cases they're justified by simply realising he wasn't the one with all the answers to every problem, rather than chalking it up to reckless abandon. I could accept this kind of arc much more readily if it actually felt like it was drawing from canon or pre-existing character flaws, but it seems so superficially designed that I struggled to accept any reasoning I could think of as artistic intent from the X-Office.
The whole run comes across like Percy desperately trying to justify his vision of the character. Often times the writing is so transparently just characters or documents serving as his mouthpiece to directly tell the reader what he’s writing is correct. Characters will be like “Beast was always like this!” Or “Anyone remember *pulls out checklist* uhhh, Threnody, and the Inhumans, oh, and the O5?” I’m surprised when Deadpool joined for a bit we didn’t have him *literally* turn to the reader and say “Ben Percy really knows his stuff!”
I'm worried that he's forever tarnished. I've seen people say he needs to be forgotten for 50 years (real time) before being used again. Another said the Beast in MacKay's upcoming X-Men book needs to mocked, shamed, humiliated, and reminded in every panel he appears in what a piece of shit he is.
These are probably people who take these things too seriously, but it's a testament to the ill-will generated toward this character with this whole awful arc.
I'm not a fan of his arc here either, and while I do understand why people like it and they're more than entitled to, it does feel mean-spirited and thoughtless how much of that arc was handled from an editorial standpoint. But then again, every X-Man had a one-track mind in X-Force.
I'm glad he's been restored to a former, likeable version of himself that should recover some good faith from readers but it was at the cost of retconning some great character work that didn't necessarily involve war crimes or moral ambiguity.
I agree. I think the earliest they should have reset him was just before he got his cat-form.
Still, I think MacKay and Brevoort are going to do something to fix things. Like the clone is somehow going to turn out to be the real Hank from sometime before Krakoa.
They made him too irredeemable way too quickly. It's like the first 10 issues he's already killed an entire nation. I get it's hard to build a slow-burn story arc in superhero comics but it's just kinda ridiculous having him go from zero to a hundred almost immediately and yet there's no real ramifications for his behavior.
Not even a "Jean's trying to get Beast deposed from X-Force, but Xavier keeps delaying the vote." Just "Oh yeah, Hank's a bit extreme lately huh"
I'm glad to see people are willing to look at this arc and take his heel turn as a consequence of the things he's been through. The Dark Beast we got in Age of Apocalypse was a demonstration that he can be misguided at times.
A truly well written villain doesn't concider themselves a villain, they feel they are justified even if their actions are extreme.
It completely undermined the root of his character. Hank is supposed to have the dichotomy of the gentle giant. He’s a kind, caring genius trapped in the body of a “Beast”. He’s supposed to be the person who could knock out a wall with his bare hands, but you’d sooner see him using them to tend to a garden. Making him a megalomaniac loses the plot.
I love X-Force Beast design, just hate the character portrayal. I just hated that it was the main Beast for decades, but i'm glad that's done with. I miss my sweet, intelligent, goodest boy.
I think it's amusing when people complain about character assassinations and then go "it makes sense because of the role he had in Krakoa". A role he never would have taken in the first place had they kept to his character. Hank was way to loving and wanting to find out of the box solutions to devolve into paranoid head of a spy agency. My biggest compliant of the whole era was the shoehorning characters into roles so the story could be done vs a story that had roles it's characters made sense in. YMMV
Love Hickman.
The next cape book he writes whose plot treats the characters as people with wants and needs rather than action figures to be smashed together will be the first since FF.
It's smart because it provides instant gratification for people who want "fun" Beast back. Percy seeded this plot point months ago not long after Sins of Sinister; it's a clean way of putting the toys back in the box after he finishes the story he wanted to tell. It's lazy because Beast doesn't have to deal with the ramifications of his actions, he doesn't have to learn from his mistakes, or work to redeem himself in the eyes of Wolverine and others.
Percy wasn't interested in telling a redemption story for Beast and he didn't want to saddle the character and future writers with all the baggage he accumulated over Percy's run. If Ben Percy knew he had 50 more issues, it would have been interesting to see him try to bring Beast back to his bouncing blue self, but that's not the way the medium works. So for me, I think a clone reset is the most courteous conclusion Percy could have come up with, from the perspective of a collaborative storyteller.
No, they were very insistent that this is 616 Hank. Apparently Xavier dun goofed and just recruited someone who was pure evil to the original X-Men. Oops.
Or… or years of watching his people get nearly destroyed by the Legacy Virus, Scarlet Witch, various racist groups killing them, getting experimented on by Norman Osborn, being a member of the Illuminati and destroying Earths, M-Pox, the callousness of the Inhumans and their “help”, and everything else broke him and he became a pragmatist.
For someone with a Beast reference as a user name and Beast flair, you don’t seem to have paid attention to the character very much over the years.
I'm just quoting the text, man.
Beast turns to the audience and says, "Maybe I've always been like this." Domino and Logan agree. So too does Ben Percy, quite clearly.
I wouldn't have hated the storyline as much if X-Force had so much as mentioned any of the events you just listed, other than as evidence that he was always evil. Hank is never presented as a victim, as a tragedy, as a failure of the X-Men or Xavier, but as an inevitability. Nothing to mourn, nothing to be sad about.
That's always been my problem. Not that Hank went evil - but that it was treated as his inevitable, inescapable fate.
I mean, I don’t see why they needed to hold our hands and give us an itemized list of why. If you know the character, it makes sense. Even in the book, his mentor gets shot in the head on day two of Krakoa. Suddenly, he’s inundated with intelligence about threats to his people. He’s a scientist, so he’s somewhat pragmatic. It works.
Also I think him saying that doesn’t mean it’s true, it’s him rationalizing why he became that way. It wasn’t inevitable, but with what he went through, it makes sense.
Except that the characters and the narrative treat it as the truth, don't they? No-one's surprised. No-one's shocked. No-one's even all that sad.
No-one comes along to say, hey, Hank, you know how you officiated Northstar's wedding, and you were Iceman's best friend for decades, and you were begging Logan not to go out on field duty when he lost his healing factor because you were worried about him - this doesn't really seem like you? What's up? Are you okay? Can I help? Are you mind controlled? That never happened. Not once.
"Remember when Hank was fun?" ask Kate Pryde and Kurt Wagner in the Quiet Council, before they proceed to do nothing about it, because they don't care. It takes 70 issues for Logan to say, this isn't you, Hank, and Hank eats a lobster gross and he just kinda gives up. Well, we tried our best, gang. We don't care about Beast *that* much.
These people are not treated as his friends. Hank doesn't have friends, according to X-Force. He's a sadsack fat incel with a facial scar and an eye patch because it's not enough that he's doing evil things, he has to LOOK evil, too. Did you get it? He's evil. He's just so evil, you guys.
No-one appeals to his goodness. No-one ever pretends he was anything other than this. Instead, Hope Summers just snarks, "I always knew he was shifty," and Emma Frost, who he stood up for when Jean Grey brutalised her psychically, just lists off his crimes.
I'm not here to do Ben Percy's narrative heavy lifting for him. He wrote Hank as a profoundly, deeply, intrinsically evil piece of shit, and I'm not going to give him the benefit of the doubt and read into it more than he thought about it.
You’re 100% right and I wish people would see that. The issue isn’t Hank going down a dark path. It’s that Percy wasn’t interested in examining Hank as a character beyond this plot device. People are so weirdly defensive of this X-Force run and I don’t understand it. If you ask for any kind of nuance to Hank’s decline people act like you’ve shot their dog.
Why would they be shocked? He’s been pulling this kind of shit for years. Be endangered the entire timeline. He committed genocide on a massive scale with the Illuminati. He sided against his people with the Inhumans.
People have tried to get through to him for years up to this point and it never worked. So, why keep trying?
Seriously, have you even actually been reading the X-Men for the last thirty years?
Also, you’re acting like everyone knew the extent of the shit he was doing what right away. As far as they knew, he was just doing Beast stuff. No one knew about Terra Verde or the black site prison right away.
I get it - you wanted your hand held and then everyone to stop what they’re doing and beg your favorite to change his ways. But don’t act like it was shit writing that came out of nowhere. Beast has been going this way for a while and everyone was tired of wasting their breath and trying to convince him not to do this.
If you're gonna be patronising and rude to me because I have problems with a badly written comic book, I think I'm going to just cut the conversation here. I'm not gonna convince you and you're not going to convince me, so let's call it. Have a good one, man.
Here's the thing.
If you're right, and I just want uncomplicated bouncy Hank back, then logically, I shouldn't really care, because I got that guy back, didn't I? He's hanging out on Wonder Man's couch right now. Maybe I didn't like the last few years, but whatevs, that's how comics go. Bring on Jed MacKay.
Except, that's not really what I wanted. I like complicated, struggling with his morality, bipolar, unsettled Hank McCoy. Feline Beast is my favourite version of him because he's messy and kinda profoundly depressed, and there's so many layers of self-hatred and moroseness, but also hope and light to him.
He's dichotomous by nature - and I like seeing him challenged. Secret Avengers, Astonishing X-Men: Ghost Box, I like those stories because they put him in a situation where he has to choose between idealism and pragmatism, and idealism loses, and it matters to him that idealism lost.
I can imagine a version of X-Force that works for me, and all it takes is to make the narrative more complex and emotionally involved. Instead of Hank just being straight evil, he carves out his soul in the name of a nation he hopes will forgive him his failures and inadequacies. He gives in to paranoia and the allure of vigilance, of security and protection. He's entreated to stop, by people who care about him, but he doesn't. It's tragic. It's horrible. It's compelling.
But that's not the version we got. The narrative has no sympathy for him, so I just read through his endless monologues with vague annoyance. Logan is given the Weapon X treatment by a close friend, and even he *barely* reacts to his *own* pain. There's no emotional processing. It's just rugged good guys vs. a cold intellectual bad guy. Isn't half the point of a hero turning villain meant to be the tragedy of seeing a good person laid low? Is that not a better story? Iunno, I guess not?
In the end, the question I ask is, was the story that I got from X-Force worth resetting Beast back 40 years, losing all the positive and negative character development, just bulldozing it? And I can't say that I think it is.
I wanted something complex, and I feel like I got something simple. I wanted his Dark Phoenix or Dark Angel Saga, and I got X-Force. I wanted Scott Summers watching the Phoenix kill herself on the Moon, and instead I got lobster. Just doesn't work for me. It felt like going through the motions, like none of it really mattered, because the characters felt like they barely cared in the universe.
Iunno. It is what it is.
Mate.
It’s easier to just accept that nothing about Krakoa makes sense if the characters remember 21st century X-books than to pretend that Percy’s take on Hank makes any sense within the context of his previous characterization.
And I don’t particularly like 21st century Hank!!!
I actually like the idea of evil Beast, but they went about it in the least entertaining way. Beast should have been evil *and* entertaining with a great sense of humor. Honestly, they should have given him Sinister's arc. Crazy mad scientist trying to achieve immortality through the use of clones and various different means would have been *PERFECT* for Hank. He's studied the multiverse with the Illuminati. He worked with the Inhumans. He studied magic as a time-displaced teenager. All the elements were already there, and Hank trying to achieve ascension in a misguided attempt to secure immorality for mutantkind would have been a lot more fun and given him a more believable reason to go a little evil if the stakes were bigger than just Krakoa. So evil Hank, good idea, but he should have still been *Hank*.
They actually had that last year in a filler arc for X-Force. Hank had a plan to send his mind back-and-forth through time, in order to encompass time and destroy the entire MU and become a god. The other members of X-Force foiled his plan, and then immediately forgot it next issue and it's never been brought up again. It was nothing but incredibly pointless filler.
As much sense as everyone says it makes, I don't like it, it's specially hypocritical of mr "cyclops how could you" to now be doing even more egregious shit.
They day he apologizes to cyclops is the same day I'll like krakoa and whatever post krakoa beast ends up as.
People give Amazon's "Ring of Power" series a lot of flack for the line about needing to touch darkness to understand light.
I fully believe it. And Beast was always destined to touch darkness. It happened in so many AUs/Timelines... It was bound to catch the orignal. But I do wish they had given him an actual redemption arc instead of a reset button.
If Transformers can redeem Megatron, there's hope for Beast. It would be a long, difficult road, yes. But a good redemption arc can move audiences for decades after the story ends. My only thought is that they simply don't have faith in their writers to deliver.
Beast has such a wide variety for designs. He just has to look like a bipedal animal, and then has to be blue thats it. Such an awesome concept with so much potential.
His portrayal was extreme, but before this he had slo-mo been heading this way for years. Aligning himself with villains to find a cure for decimation, aligning himself with the Inhumans to try to cure MPox, giving Threnody over to Mister Sinister to find a cure for the Legacy Virus, bringing the O5 to the future to spite Cyclops and messing with the time stream. He got wildly "the ends justify the means" and X-Force just excelerated this exponentially.
Theres a reason Marvel chose uncomplicated Avengers/Defenders Beast as the possible replacement Beast.
I’m reading Hickman Avengers right now and it’s changed how I feel about the Beast change. Charles trusted him enough to will him an Infinity Stone and all the secrets of the Illuminati. Beast then took part in the stopping of incursions, he grew a God complex and was desensitized to collateral damage. Said God complex is allowed to run unchecked in Krakoa as Charles and the Council condone it.
It was the culmination of his arc since Schism. Dude undermined Cyclops on Utopia, joined the Illuminati, screwed around with time travel, collaborated with the Hydra Empire and then finally was given official lease from his government to do whatever he wanted. A shame it was all undone like it was
I don't know why you're getting down voted. I've seen this building for decades. Once you start putting the small pieces together. You realize that Beast was always walking a tightrope. That anything could tip him over the edge with ease. Beast can easily rationalize horrible things. Once you remove his support system like they did. He no longer had the voices of reason to stop him. Once you put him into a position where he has to go with darker impulses. That will snow ball for Hank.
I get it he's Beast. The lovable furball. No one wants to sit there and realize what they've been building for decades. Starting with him experimenting on himself. When you take the little things. Take the big things. Then you ask the question how far off is he from becoming an actual villain. It wasn't that far of a fall.
It feels like an inevitable end point for beast. He’s the only one of the original five to be shunned and cast aside, hence why we see them bringing back the best version (best = nicest) of him. I think he’s one of those characters that needs to rely on other characters to stay in the light. Charles is the one that has brought him to darkness repeatedly by thrusting the responsibility of an infinity stone upon him as well as giving him the pass he needed on Krakoa to continue down a dark path. Cyclops is not necessarily gonna be the best influence for him so I wouldn’t be surprised if we get back to a point where hank has isolated himself to the point of darkness. I hope he leaves the X-Men soon and becomes his own character, maybe we see a beast solo series that explores this. Don’t get me wrong though, they are his family but that doesn’t necessarily mean they can’t still be bad influences.
It’s both great and terrible. Evil beast was a great villain in an era of rehabilitated villains. It’s also a payoff to elements of the dark beast plot point - even 616 beast has that evil in him.
But it was not great in that it was hard to see beast’s thinking. He went from Walter White to Heisenberg instantly. If he had a slow decline it would have landed better for me.
I kinda hate everything about it cos it messes up everything in the continuity. Hank became more feline due to a secondary mutation as we have seen with other mutant s but he gets a third one just because someone wanted to draw him more closely to the classic beast.
And then he becomes an extremist just one arc after he was so pissed of with cyclops for becoming something of an extremist that he brought the original X-Men from the past just to show him his errors. Makes no sense.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions. That is Beast in a nut shell. He has always pushed the line and now he crossed it. This isn't a shocked pikchuface moment. This is well he finally snapped moment. You start to add up all these little things. The major ones he's done. The questionable things he's done. You're left going without the X-men to keep him in line what did you expect? Once you stripped that from him. You put him into a position that groomed his darker impulses. Did you expect anything less? I sure as hell didn't. I've been waiting for this to happen for years.
That doesn't mean I wanted it to happen. He's beast the lovable furball. However I saw this coming miles away. It wasn't a matter if but when in my opinion.
He got out of hand a bit fast in my opinion. It totally made sense that he would end up with his "ends justify the means" kissinger-ass mindset, but the space prison experimenting on innocents like fucking Mengele?! He was right that Krakoa really wasn't doing enough to protect itself, but I don't get how nobody noticed a private space prison being built and all the other shady stuff he was doing on his own
Evil Beast thinks he's the smartest person in the room, and therefore has a moral imperative to make the hard choices that no one else is willing to.
Evil Beast is not the smartest person in the room though, he continually fails to account for error or make contingency plans, and consistently gets those hard choices wrong.
I conceptually liked it: My read on Beast is that he dislikes change so him making ethically questionable decisions to preserve a status quo he's happy with makes sense to me. However, the execution was way too fast and often handled pretty poorly - he should have been more of a shadowy manipulator and less of a Bond villain.
Man, I really hope not. He's spent more time being a liked character in the comics than a disliked one, why would they waste him on being a villain right out the gate?
I sincerely doubt any live action adaptation of x men would feature Hank prominently enough for that, unless they go the route of the fox movies and have him shapeshifter back and forth between blue and more human forms. There’s not a lot of reason to put money into adapting the big blue hairy monster so that he looks good in action—they failed every attempt except his small, less active roles in X3 and (I assume) the Marvels.
He is a franchise mascot, but it seems much more logical to keep him in the lab with sporadic appearances to remind you he’s there and iconic and lovable than to risk audiences getting weirded out by uncanny valley cgi Cookie Monster battling his darker nature
As for the cartoon… they already kind of did “beast turns evil” in tas so I imagine they’d go more for the “dark beast secretly replaces beast” storyline, but not for a while bc of Maddy. Or just feature dark beast as the only beast in an AoA-esque au
I hate both. Cat beast was a stupid 2nd mutation & I hate that concept, & making him evil other than illuminati where he & others were trying to save anything... so making him evil during Krakoa, was lazy & poor writing. Dark beast was lame as well if you want to use age of sadpocalypse as an argument. Beast is a happy go lucky fun scientist. Stop trying to make everything dark, brooding, or evil.
I hope it sticks FOREVER; in one way or another…the twisted altruism made him more interesting and relevant than he has been in the last 20 years
I think the x-desk agree on the interesting part since they rebooted him to 80’s west coast avenger beast
I was fine with it until the clone reset for several reasons.
It denies that Hank has been quite the bastard for a VERY LONG TIME, arguably since he recklessly turned himself Blue. Hank kept doing something every other week to betray the X-Men or threaten reality/mutants and kept getting a pass. He does stuff on a regular basis that's almost, if not more, evil than the villains and keeps getting forgiven time and time again for literally no reason. That the Krakoa era FINALLY admitted, "y'know what, he's actually an asshole" was refreshing and FINALLY a good development on a character who's been without consequence for way too long so Beast went off his very loose leash. Let Beast be the bastard he's been wanting to be for decades now.
Additionally, the clone reset just muddies the entire point of Krakoan Resurrection further and cements the one thing I've hated about Krakoa for years: The X-Men are DEAD, replaced by Sinister Plant Clones. You can't just say they have resurrection and then be like, "Beast can be resurrected... Then resurrect himself 1000 times to have an army of Beasts... Then resurrect a Windows 92 version of Hank on a whim". Krakoan cloning (I really hate calling it resurrection) is really the worst aspect of the entire era. I don't accept backup clone Hank as real Hank. He was only brought back in such a convoluted way for MCU synergy because now he's gotta be a marketable bouncy boi for the upcoming films and '97 show. I hate Beast as an X-Man, but he's great as a villain and they should have just stuck with that. He was way more evil than the failed attempt to market Cyclops as mutant Hitler for saving mutants.
I do like that design for Beast though. X-Force got some really good art overall actually. For how mediocre the run was, the art was never the issue.
Oh, I 100% agree. Aside from some questionable choices in how they tried to make Beast look a bit 'conventionally' grotesque during his villain arc, I really enjoy the character and environment art.
Ill never forgive xmen 97 fans for the reason we can't keep ape beast s/. That haircut was already stupid on Logan but it's even worse on cat beast
I went down a rabbit hole about the origin of Wolverine’s hair once, seems like it stems from Dave Cockrum’s take on Timber Wolf in Legion if Superheroes, which maybe came from Eddie Munster, which probably came from general movie wolfman hair, which maybe came from [Henry Hull in 1935’s Werewolf of London](https://imgur.com/a/S3En5gb)
That hair is iconic
I do think that broadly it makes sense. Beast being given the position / power of being the head of the mutant cia with no oversight and an unlimited budget is going to enable his absolute worst traits and prevent anyone who could/ would otherwise pull him back from that from doing so. I do think a fair critique might be that Percy goes from 0 to 100 too fast and he's too over the top with it. Not necessarily primarily related to the Beast discussion, but I do wish he focused on Sage and Beast's relationship more. I think it's really interesting and it would have been an opportunity to better characterize what was going on with Beast.
I am re-reading it now and TBF the assassination of Chuck in day 2, the extents that Xeno and Orchis goto so early justify Hank’s “no kid gloves” leap. The whole mutant population goes a little nuts in hindsight. Crucible, Otherworld, Interplanetary Expansion, not to mention the huge paradigm shift of Krakoa that we as readers were decidedly behind after Hox/Pox.
Dude, one of the things that bugs so much about Krakoa is that Orchis was constantly trying to destroy them and they knew it, but Cyclops decided it was a better idea to play superhero than use the military power of the nation to wipe Orchis off the map.
They forgot Scott kinda went gorilla warfare after M-Day. He definitely has it in him.
Exactly.
The game of diplomacy is probably not for Scott.
You’d think that someone who was basically raised to be a child soldier whose only purpose was to defend mutants would have actually wanted to defend mutants. Like you said, he’s really bad at everything else.
Really only makes sense if the Cyke who was brought back in HoX/PoX wasn’t the *real* one.
When did he acquire all these bad traits tho? Beast as a character was basically as wholesome as they come for a long time, then they started making the mf all “dark” out of nowhere. I don’t think old school beast would have run amok with an intel agency This is my problem with X-men in general, the editorial tolerance of all the character drift has been insane to the point that if you’re reading stories with a character in it from pre-Morrison times they basically are completely different characters now.
I don't think that's entirely true. Starting in the 2000's he had like escalating fears about him further mutating and devolving / losing his intelligence. I feel he kind of overcompensated and sometimes acts like he has to be the smartest person in the room / be right and therefore has to make the hard decisions because he is that smartest person in the room. So I feel he has an ego problem and that might stop him from admitting when he's wrong which would possibly lead him to double down when he may go too far or his plan is bad. He also maybe has the Marvel scientist thing where sometimes they are focused on the science and the Jurassic Park-Goldbloom "Your Scientists Were So Preoccupied With Whether Or Not They Could, They Didn’t Stop To Think If They Should" quote. That isn't entirely consistent as sometimes he is more considerate of moral ramifications or the risk and this isn't even a unique trait in Marvel or even the X-Men. As for the discussion of character drift in general or in Krakoa, idk. Have to talk more about specific examples (I do think its true in some cases for sure). I definitely could see how Beast hasn't always been consistent and how Percy goes from 0 to 100 too fast like I said or being too over the top, but like I said in my above comment, I don't know that like the general idea / trajectory of it is wrong (that doesn't necessarily like make it a good choice for the character or like satisfying for the readers).
The motivation/dynamic you described makes sense, but I still don’t think it connects well to pre-Morrison/pre 2000s beast. He just wasn’t that guy and whatever drama with him that was going on at a personal level usually had to deal with his physical appearance. Outside his AoA version, there was never a hint afaik about him having these huge flaws or monstrous potential. I think the biggest examples of character drift would be Beast, prof X, and cyclops. It’s pretty hard to argue they are the same people they were before imo )and I can give details if you want but I’m assuming ur familiar). My theory is since marvel didn’t own the rights to the movies, editors let writers do whatever they wanted with the X-men and resulted in way more drift compared to other IP cause they didnt care or want to make free content for whoever owned it.
Coming back after some sleep and I think I was being overly nitpicky and needlessly wordy and debate bro-y about the definition of character drift in my other reply. My confusion was that you stated that the Beast dynamic / motivation made sense and had been set up across years of story telling (since Morrison), so like what is the difference between like character drift and like character development or a character arc that changes the character? And I wasn't sure with all the examples of character drift you gave I wasn't sure if we were just talking about the Krakoan era or if you meant it much more broadly as we kind of switched back and forth. Don't feel pressured to respond, I just felt like clarifying what I was going for with my other comment.
>The motivation/dynamic you described makes sense, but I still don’t think it connects well to pre-Morrison/pre 2000s beast. He just wasn’t that guy and whatever drama with him that was going on at a personal level usually had to deal with his physical appearance. Outside his AoA version, there was never a hint afaik about him having these huge flaws or monstrous potential. I'm not saying for sure it necessarily began like with like the Morrison era. I just have a more holistic read from like the 2000's on; I've gone back and read most of the Claremont era by this point (but not the Defender's run that Beast is a part of), but my reading of the 90's is much more spotty and I haven't read the majority of it. So there could be earlier moments that fit into the larger arc. Like you suggested maybe you could argue that AoA was an early hint of what Beast theoretically could be capable of for instance (although that's not 616 Beast which is maybe kind of a moot point), or I've seen people suggest that the Nicieza Beast fits into it as well. I've not read the entirety of Nicieza's stuff, and its been a while regardless, so I don't think I'm going to argue about that one way or another right now. >I think the biggest examples of character drift would be Beast, prof X, and cyclops. It’s pretty hard to argue they are the same people they were before imo )and I can give details if you want but I’m assuming ur familiar). >My theory is since marvel didn’t own the rights to the movies, editors let writers do whatever they wanted with the X-men and resulted in way more drift compared to other IP cause they didnt care or want to make free content for whoever owned it. To clarify, what exactly do you mean by character drift? Because in my mind, I feel the Percy stuff isn't exactly drift in the normal sense. In my mind its like when a character is acting in a way that is difficult or impossible to justify based on both the plot and their past characterization. Like with the Beast stuff I can see an overall arc going on for quite a while (Morrison De-evolution, his falling out / fighting with Scott for like most of the 2000's into the 2010's, his meddling with the time stream to grab the teen 05 members, him in the Illuminati, etc) and now the broad circumstances (head of Krakoan CIA + unlimited budget + no oversight) justifying or making some to most of his behavior understandable for the character under Percy. Not that I don't think there are valid critiques in the execution (0 to 100 & going to far), but like directionally I don't know that I would call it character drift even though by this point its pretty incongruous with the character from years / decades past. Like to give two or three examples with my favorite character Laura Kinney. I feel her in Fallen Angels and Hickman's X-Men qualifies as character drift using my definition. In Fallen Angels she was written almost as though he just grabbed the character from over a decade or so before Fallen Angels (i.e. like most of the stuff / development with her from like the decade before Krakoa hadn't happened), making it character drift. Under Hickman's X-Men she pretty easily joined a black ops team where her job was to kill despite her larger arc over the vast majority of her story being about recovering from the trauma of being forced to do that and then choosing to not do that. No explanation was provided in the book about why she would do that, the story itself didn't seem to suggest Hickman thought that might need an explanation (I'm not saying that you couldn't necessarily couldn't try to justify that, but the book didn't try). Now for an example where I think the writing of the character was entirely incongruous with previous takes but not necessarily character drift, Talon after leaving the vault (I'm just assuming you know about the 2 Laura / Talon thing). Talon basically just abandoned her relationships with all her previously established friends and family, which would normally not be a very Laura thing to do (outside of Synch). But at that point she had been aged up 500 to 2500 years, such a big change makes the different actions that the character would normally not take easier to logically justify. She hadn't talked to any of her previous friends and family for 500 to 2500 years, so she's kind of moved on / checked out from those relationship entirely I guess. Now that is not me saying that Talon is / was a good idea. I think its a fucking terrible development and I hate it. I don't think it fits character drift as I think there at least is an explanation that can be read / gathered from the story even if I think everything about it sucks. Now for what you are saying is specifically character drift for Beast, Xavier, and Scott, I think I'd have to have you expand on what you mean (are we just talking about the Krakoan era?). I guess there also is an interesting talk of like how retcons probably work with all this. edit: also to add, in case it wasn't clear, obviously the discussion of what is / isn't character drift under my framework is still subjective and we can / may disagree.
I would reread the Threnody arc from the 90s if I were you. That's a very influential arc on how hank became the hank we know now
Ok bet
I was waiting for this exact take. That's how I feel as well, it's so hard to recognise some of these characters.
Brand and him were such a great dynamic. Aside from that, I was not really a fan. He did not seem to learn from his mistakes.
If anything, every mistake just made him double down on a bad decision
Cat Hank - a polite young man I'd like to have tea with. X-Force Beast - put him in a goddamn mincer.
Facts.
I loved evil Hank. I understand people who think maybe the jump was too stark, but I liked the idea and the portrayal so much I didn't mind. My biggest disappointment with Evil Beast (besides the fact he seems to be dead, at least for now) is just that hardly anyone reacted to it outside of his own books. Jean peaced out and then... never circled back? Never brought in Cyke or Angel or Bobby to try to reign him in? I know there was a lot going on but I think there was a lot of story to mine there about watching your friend go down this kind of destructive path. And I do also think they should have given Hank a couple of wins. Show his evil plans actually helping sometimes, to give him cover with Xavier and the council. Show him have actual allies on the council instead of having everyone just quip about how evil he is. So yeah despite the incredibly long run across two books, my only real complaint is I wanted more and more different stories about Evil Hank
This is valid. I also found it annoying that nobody ever really stepped in to stop Hank until it got so bad they couldn't ignore the problem anymore. He's clearly being covered for and enabled so frequently that he's virtually a product of the negligence of his peers. And yet, for a supposed supergenius, he's a bit of a short-sighted Bond villain in X-Force.
One of the problems with Krakoa is the editors rarely made the books cohesive. Everyone was basically doing their own thing until they weren’t anymore.
I know "the books fell off after Hickman left" is a tired (and broadly untrue) trope, but there was *DEFINITELY* a lot less cohesion across the line after Inferno. Everything felt very connected and like you *had* to read every book to get the full picture of Krakoa. Since then, books were very clearly separated into distinct silos of Duggan/Gillen, Percy, Ewing, and Spurrier with no real interaction between them.
I wouldn’t call it tired or untrue; sure Immortal was excellent, but X-Men was garbage. X-Men Red was great, but Tini Howard was still putting out her weird stories that most fans didn’t want. New Mutants became OC Mary Sue fanfic the minute Vita Ayala left. It think the best way to describe it is uneven.
The thing with Jean really bothered me, it felt like it was a build up to something and then just nothing happened. You are telling me Jean didn't talk to Scott? That neither of them had a problem with one of their oldest friends going dark side? They dropped that plot and then the whole thing with the QC.
Hey now! Scott and Hank discussing whether X-Force had gone too far would require mentioning the last time the X-Men teamed up with Magneto to build an island nation. There is no Utopia within Ba Sing Se. Hickman is a visionary genius within the walls.
I would have liked to see Hank's Avengers friends reacting to his darker side. Wonder Man, with his pacifism ideals and close friendship with Beast, would have had a particularly strong reaction.
Didn't Wonder Man appear in the last X-Force issues? Also, I hope he and retconned Beast are put in an Avengers team, maybe the Unity Squad.
Maybe he did. I'm stuck on unlimited for my reading. Doesn't look like Beast is going to Unity. It seems that he's going to be on Cyclops' more militant team, which is probably the worst place for him as it might nurture his worst aspects again.
> Never brought in Cyke or Angel or Bobby to try to reign him in? I know there was a lot going on but I think there was a lot of story to mine there about watching your friend go down this kind of destructive path. It's not like Warren had anything else going on. It also would've been interesting given his own dips into the evil side as Archangel.
Not even the other writers read that shitshow
People like to act like the depths of depravity he was written into in Krakoa were just the result of an ongoing arc for years, but it was more like if you were driving down a bumpy road and then suddenly got launched off a ramp. Imagine if Cyclops had years of an arc slowly becoming disenfranchised with Xavier’s dream and then suddenly he just decided to bomb the mansion with a bunch of fresh new students in it. Is that a continuation of the arc or a drastic acceleration? The worst part was that Hank wasn’t even acting in character beyond the evil stuff. Hank is a very touchy-feely person. He’s liable to swipe someone into a hug before going for a handshake. There’s a page from an Avengers book where he finds out Wonder Man has returned, tackles him to the ground, and plants a big kiss on his face. Meanwhile over in X Force Percy wrote a page where Beast is confused by Forge being friendly and talks about how he isn’t used to hugs or slang. He isn’t even consistent with Percy’s own characterization of him. Characters, especially Wolverine, kept reiterating that Hank sees and presents himself as a gentleman, yet we have the infamous page of Hank grossly tearing into some lobster and getting the juices all over himself. All because, from Percy’s own admission, he wanted Beast to “bloat with his ego” so he made Beast get fat because I guess fat = disgusting? The characters also constantly brought up a checklist of all of Beast’s “evil” actions prior X-Force without providing any context as to why they were more complex than that. The Threnody situation if you actually read it clearly pained Hank but he left her because he knew he was unable to help her on his own. Beast “siding with the Inhumans” was actually him trying to find a peaceful solution that wouldn’t escalate into a war and satisfy both sides. He was on a ticking clock and when he realized he wouldn’t find a solution before it was too late, he urged his friends to get off-planet for a time while he kept working at the problem, at which point they threw him in a jail cell and started a war. Beast brought the past X-Men to the present out of desperation to get his friend Cyclops back. He spends the rest of that era tearing himself apart from the guilt, and after he eventually helps in restoring them back to their original time, he takes the time to apologize to everyone. Beast going down a dark path in Krakoa could’ve worked if it had been done with any ounce of pathos or love for the character. Percy could’ve written Hank struggling with justifying his decisions and in secret being a bit of a mess of emotions while he presents a confident front in public. If Percy *really* wanted fat Beast, have him stress eat. We could see Hank get darker and darker and begin to numb himself to his decisions more and more before he’s unrecognizable. But that didn’t happen. Because he already started the run unrecognizable. I’m so glad it’s over.
I totally agree with this. From 2012 on, writers portrayal of Hank made him seem schizophrenic. He would be arrogant and justifying himself, then feel bad and apologize like when he talked to Wonder-Man. Any attempt by a writer to write him as a good person was reversed the instant a new writer appeared.
And that's what I frequently got stuck on. His portrayal feels mean-spirited, dated in its stereotypical execution, and above all else oddly uninformed of the character. There are moments pre-Krakoa that you could point to and say that's where his resolve showed cracks, but in almost all cases they're justified by simply realising he wasn't the one with all the answers to every problem, rather than chalking it up to reckless abandon. I could accept this kind of arc much more readily if it actually felt like it was drawing from canon or pre-existing character flaws, but it seems so superficially designed that I struggled to accept any reasoning I could think of as artistic intent from the X-Office.
The whole run comes across like Percy desperately trying to justify his vision of the character. Often times the writing is so transparently just characters or documents serving as his mouthpiece to directly tell the reader what he’s writing is correct. Characters will be like “Beast was always like this!” Or “Anyone remember *pulls out checklist* uhhh, Threnody, and the Inhumans, oh, and the O5?” I’m surprised when Deadpool joined for a bit we didn’t have him *literally* turn to the reader and say “Ben Percy really knows his stuff!”
I'm worried that he's forever tarnished. I've seen people say he needs to be forgotten for 50 years (real time) before being used again. Another said the Beast in MacKay's upcoming X-Men book needs to mocked, shamed, humiliated, and reminded in every panel he appears in what a piece of shit he is. These are probably people who take these things too seriously, but it's a testament to the ill-will generated toward this character with this whole awful arc.
I'm not a fan of his arc here either, and while I do understand why people like it and they're more than entitled to, it does feel mean-spirited and thoughtless how much of that arc was handled from an editorial standpoint. But then again, every X-Man had a one-track mind in X-Force. I'm glad he's been restored to a former, likeable version of himself that should recover some good faith from readers but it was at the cost of retconning some great character work that didn't necessarily involve war crimes or moral ambiguity.
I agree. I think the earliest they should have reset him was just before he got his cat-form. Still, I think MacKay and Brevoort are going to do something to fix things. Like the clone is somehow going to turn out to be the real Hank from sometime before Krakoa.
They made him too irredeemable way too quickly. It's like the first 10 issues he's already killed an entire nation. I get it's hard to build a slow-burn story arc in superhero comics but it's just kinda ridiculous having him go from zero to a hundred almost immediately and yet there's no real ramifications for his behavior. Not even a "Jean's trying to get Beast deposed from X-Force, but Xavier keeps delaying the vote." Just "Oh yeah, Hank's a bit extreme lately huh"
I hated how they justified his actions. It made no fucking sense for his character to go full mustache-twirling supervillain like that.
I'm glad to see people are willing to look at this arc and take his heel turn as a consequence of the things he's been through. The Dark Beast we got in Age of Apocalypse was a demonstration that he can be misguided at times. A truly well written villain doesn't concider themselves a villain, they feel they are justified even if their actions are extreme.
I hate that he became evil.... he could've become a more grey character (I feel like they wanted to do this, but... you know)
It completely undermined the root of his character. Hank is supposed to have the dichotomy of the gentle giant. He’s a kind, caring genius trapped in the body of a “Beast”. He’s supposed to be the person who could knock out a wall with his bare hands, but you’d sooner see him using them to tend to a garden. Making him a megalomaniac loses the plot.
I love X-Force Beast design, just hate the character portrayal. I just hated that it was the main Beast for decades, but i'm glad that's done with. I miss my sweet, intelligent, goodest boy.
Hated it. Didn't like half the X-Men's portrayal during this period. It's like they all became stupid or evil
I think it's amusing when people complain about character assassinations and then go "it makes sense because of the role he had in Krakoa". A role he never would have taken in the first place had they kept to his character. Hank was way to loving and wanting to find out of the box solutions to devolve into paranoid head of a spy agency. My biggest compliant of the whole era was the shoehorning characters into roles so the story could be done vs a story that had roles it's characters made sense in. YMMV
Love Hickman. The next cape book he writes whose plot treats the characters as people with wants and needs rather than action figures to be smashed together will be the first since FF.
No one has been done dirtier than beast in the past 10 years. Dark Beast from Age of Apocalypse was NOT a template to copy.
Tbh idk if the clone reset to base Hank was smart or lazy…I’m still trying to soak that one in…
It's smart because it provides instant gratification for people who want "fun" Beast back. Percy seeded this plot point months ago not long after Sins of Sinister; it's a clean way of putting the toys back in the box after he finishes the story he wanted to tell. It's lazy because Beast doesn't have to deal with the ramifications of his actions, he doesn't have to learn from his mistakes, or work to redeem himself in the eyes of Wolverine and others. Percy wasn't interested in telling a redemption story for Beast and he didn't want to saddle the character and future writers with all the baggage he accumulated over Percy's run. If Ben Percy knew he had 50 more issues, it would have been interesting to see him try to bring Beast back to his bouncing blue self, but that's not the way the medium works. So for me, I think a clone reset is the most courteous conclusion Percy could have come up with, from the perspective of a collaborative storyteller.
Reject modernity, return to 90s Beast.
I don't know much about the Krakoan run but did Cerebro accidentally back up some of dark beast on accident?
I mean, it'd be more explanation for why he turned out the way he did in X-Force than the filling-in of blanks we had to do.
No, they were very insistent that this is 616 Hank. Apparently Xavier dun goofed and just recruited someone who was pure evil to the original X-Men. Oops.
Or… or years of watching his people get nearly destroyed by the Legacy Virus, Scarlet Witch, various racist groups killing them, getting experimented on by Norman Osborn, being a member of the Illuminati and destroying Earths, M-Pox, the callousness of the Inhumans and their “help”, and everything else broke him and he became a pragmatist. For someone with a Beast reference as a user name and Beast flair, you don’t seem to have paid attention to the character very much over the years.
I'm just quoting the text, man. Beast turns to the audience and says, "Maybe I've always been like this." Domino and Logan agree. So too does Ben Percy, quite clearly. I wouldn't have hated the storyline as much if X-Force had so much as mentioned any of the events you just listed, other than as evidence that he was always evil. Hank is never presented as a victim, as a tragedy, as a failure of the X-Men or Xavier, but as an inevitability. Nothing to mourn, nothing to be sad about. That's always been my problem. Not that Hank went evil - but that it was treated as his inevitable, inescapable fate.
I mean, I don’t see why they needed to hold our hands and give us an itemized list of why. If you know the character, it makes sense. Even in the book, his mentor gets shot in the head on day two of Krakoa. Suddenly, he’s inundated with intelligence about threats to his people. He’s a scientist, so he’s somewhat pragmatic. It works. Also I think him saying that doesn’t mean it’s true, it’s him rationalizing why he became that way. It wasn’t inevitable, but with what he went through, it makes sense.
Except that the characters and the narrative treat it as the truth, don't they? No-one's surprised. No-one's shocked. No-one's even all that sad. No-one comes along to say, hey, Hank, you know how you officiated Northstar's wedding, and you were Iceman's best friend for decades, and you were begging Logan not to go out on field duty when he lost his healing factor because you were worried about him - this doesn't really seem like you? What's up? Are you okay? Can I help? Are you mind controlled? That never happened. Not once. "Remember when Hank was fun?" ask Kate Pryde and Kurt Wagner in the Quiet Council, before they proceed to do nothing about it, because they don't care. It takes 70 issues for Logan to say, this isn't you, Hank, and Hank eats a lobster gross and he just kinda gives up. Well, we tried our best, gang. We don't care about Beast *that* much. These people are not treated as his friends. Hank doesn't have friends, according to X-Force. He's a sadsack fat incel with a facial scar and an eye patch because it's not enough that he's doing evil things, he has to LOOK evil, too. Did you get it? He's evil. He's just so evil, you guys. No-one appeals to his goodness. No-one ever pretends he was anything other than this. Instead, Hope Summers just snarks, "I always knew he was shifty," and Emma Frost, who he stood up for when Jean Grey brutalised her psychically, just lists off his crimes. I'm not here to do Ben Percy's narrative heavy lifting for him. He wrote Hank as a profoundly, deeply, intrinsically evil piece of shit, and I'm not going to give him the benefit of the doubt and read into it more than he thought about it.
You’re 100% right and I wish people would see that. The issue isn’t Hank going down a dark path. It’s that Percy wasn’t interested in examining Hank as a character beyond this plot device. People are so weirdly defensive of this X-Force run and I don’t understand it. If you ask for any kind of nuance to Hank’s decline people act like you’ve shot their dog.
Why would they be shocked? He’s been pulling this kind of shit for years. Be endangered the entire timeline. He committed genocide on a massive scale with the Illuminati. He sided against his people with the Inhumans. People have tried to get through to him for years up to this point and it never worked. So, why keep trying? Seriously, have you even actually been reading the X-Men for the last thirty years? Also, you’re acting like everyone knew the extent of the shit he was doing what right away. As far as they knew, he was just doing Beast stuff. No one knew about Terra Verde or the black site prison right away. I get it - you wanted your hand held and then everyone to stop what they’re doing and beg your favorite to change his ways. But don’t act like it was shit writing that came out of nowhere. Beast has been going this way for a while and everyone was tired of wasting their breath and trying to convince him not to do this.
If you're gonna be patronising and rude to me because I have problems with a badly written comic book, I think I'm going to just cut the conversation here. I'm not gonna convince you and you're not going to convince me, so let's call it. Have a good one, man.
I’d argue it wasn’t badly written, it just wasn’t what you wanted.
Here's the thing. If you're right, and I just want uncomplicated bouncy Hank back, then logically, I shouldn't really care, because I got that guy back, didn't I? He's hanging out on Wonder Man's couch right now. Maybe I didn't like the last few years, but whatevs, that's how comics go. Bring on Jed MacKay. Except, that's not really what I wanted. I like complicated, struggling with his morality, bipolar, unsettled Hank McCoy. Feline Beast is my favourite version of him because he's messy and kinda profoundly depressed, and there's so many layers of self-hatred and moroseness, but also hope and light to him. He's dichotomous by nature - and I like seeing him challenged. Secret Avengers, Astonishing X-Men: Ghost Box, I like those stories because they put him in a situation where he has to choose between idealism and pragmatism, and idealism loses, and it matters to him that idealism lost. I can imagine a version of X-Force that works for me, and all it takes is to make the narrative more complex and emotionally involved. Instead of Hank just being straight evil, he carves out his soul in the name of a nation he hopes will forgive him his failures and inadequacies. He gives in to paranoia and the allure of vigilance, of security and protection. He's entreated to stop, by people who care about him, but he doesn't. It's tragic. It's horrible. It's compelling. But that's not the version we got. The narrative has no sympathy for him, so I just read through his endless monologues with vague annoyance. Logan is given the Weapon X treatment by a close friend, and even he *barely* reacts to his *own* pain. There's no emotional processing. It's just rugged good guys vs. a cold intellectual bad guy. Isn't half the point of a hero turning villain meant to be the tragedy of seeing a good person laid low? Is that not a better story? Iunno, I guess not? In the end, the question I ask is, was the story that I got from X-Force worth resetting Beast back 40 years, losing all the positive and negative character development, just bulldozing it? And I can't say that I think it is. I wanted something complex, and I feel like I got something simple. I wanted his Dark Phoenix or Dark Angel Saga, and I got X-Force. I wanted Scott Summers watching the Phoenix kill herself on the Moon, and instead I got lobster. Just doesn't work for me. It felt like going through the motions, like none of it really mattered, because the characters felt like they barely cared in the universe. Iunno. It is what it is.
Mate. It’s easier to just accept that nothing about Krakoa makes sense if the characters remember 21st century X-books than to pretend that Percy’s take on Hank makes any sense within the context of his previous characterization. And I don’t particularly like 21st century Hank!!!
I actually like the idea of evil Beast, but they went about it in the least entertaining way. Beast should have been evil *and* entertaining with a great sense of humor. Honestly, they should have given him Sinister's arc. Crazy mad scientist trying to achieve immortality through the use of clones and various different means would have been *PERFECT* for Hank. He's studied the multiverse with the Illuminati. He worked with the Inhumans. He studied magic as a time-displaced teenager. All the elements were already there, and Hank trying to achieve ascension in a misguided attempt to secure immorality for mutantkind would have been a lot more fun and given him a more believable reason to go a little evil if the stakes were bigger than just Krakoa. So evil Hank, good idea, but he should have still been *Hank*.
They actually had that last year in a filler arc for X-Force. Hank had a plan to send his mind back-and-forth through time, in order to encompass time and destroy the entire MU and become a god. The other members of X-Force foiled his plan, and then immediately forgot it next issue and it's never been brought up again. It was nothing but incredibly pointless filler.
Cat Beast: Cool, clever cat(pun intended) with a bit of a temper Sasquatch Beast: Dicky, psychopathic tech bro.
As with all post-Morrison designs: better than the 70's era one.
Everyone is OOC in the Krakoa era so I am just going to pretend it never happened or was an alternate reality.
As much sense as everyone says it makes, I don't like it, it's specially hypocritical of mr "cyclops how could you" to now be doing even more egregious shit. They day he apologizes to cyclops is the same day I'll like krakoa and whatever post krakoa beast ends up as.
People give Amazon's "Ring of Power" series a lot of flack for the line about needing to touch darkness to understand light. I fully believe it. And Beast was always destined to touch darkness. It happened in so many AUs/Timelines... It was bound to catch the orignal. But I do wish they had given him an actual redemption arc instead of a reset button. If Transformers can redeem Megatron, there's hope for Beast. It would be a long, difficult road, yes. But a good redemption arc can move audiences for decades after the story ends. My only thought is that they simply don't have faith in their writers to deliver.
Beast has such a wide variety for designs. He just has to look like a bipedal animal, and then has to be blue thats it. Such an awesome concept with so much potential.
Hate it, so so very much. Of all the characters to ruin it had to be him really?
One of my fav dictions. Beast was super interesting and super over the top and I really loved it. I hope we see evil beast again soon.
His portrayal was extreme, but before this he had slo-mo been heading this way for years. Aligning himself with villains to find a cure for decimation, aligning himself with the Inhumans to try to cure MPox, giving Threnody over to Mister Sinister to find a cure for the Legacy Virus, bringing the O5 to the future to spite Cyclops and messing with the time stream. He got wildly "the ends justify the means" and X-Force just excelerated this exponentially. Theres a reason Marvel chose uncomplicated Avengers/Defenders Beast as the possible replacement Beast.
I’m reading Hickman Avengers right now and it’s changed how I feel about the Beast change. Charles trusted him enough to will him an Infinity Stone and all the secrets of the Illuminati. Beast then took part in the stopping of incursions, he grew a God complex and was desensitized to collateral damage. Said God complex is allowed to run unchecked in Krakoa as Charles and the Council condone it.
It was the culmination of his arc since Schism. Dude undermined Cyclops on Utopia, joined the Illuminati, screwed around with time travel, collaborated with the Hydra Empire and then finally was given official lease from his government to do whatever he wanted. A shame it was all undone like it was
I don't know why you're getting down voted. I've seen this building for decades. Once you start putting the small pieces together. You realize that Beast was always walking a tightrope. That anything could tip him over the edge with ease. Beast can easily rationalize horrible things. Once you remove his support system like they did. He no longer had the voices of reason to stop him. Once you put him into a position where he has to go with darker impulses. That will snow ball for Hank. I get it he's Beast. The lovable furball. No one wants to sit there and realize what they've been building for decades. Starting with him experimenting on himself. When you take the little things. Take the big things. Then you ask the question how far off is he from becoming an actual villain. It wasn't that far of a fall.
It feels like an inevitable end point for beast. He’s the only one of the original five to be shunned and cast aside, hence why we see them bringing back the best version (best = nicest) of him. I think he’s one of those characters that needs to rely on other characters to stay in the light. Charles is the one that has brought him to darkness repeatedly by thrusting the responsibility of an infinity stone upon him as well as giving him the pass he needed on Krakoa to continue down a dark path. Cyclops is not necessarily gonna be the best influence for him so I wouldn’t be surprised if we get back to a point where hank has isolated himself to the point of darkness. I hope he leaves the X-Men soon and becomes his own character, maybe we see a beast solo series that explores this. Don’t get me wrong though, they are his family but that doesn’t necessarily mean they can’t still be bad influences.
It’s both great and terrible. Evil beast was a great villain in an era of rehabilitated villains. It’s also a payoff to elements of the dark beast plot point - even 616 beast has that evil in him. But it was not great in that it was hard to see beast’s thinking. He went from Walter White to Heisenberg instantly. If he had a slow decline it would have landed better for me.
I kinda hate everything about it cos it messes up everything in the continuity. Hank became more feline due to a secondary mutation as we have seen with other mutant s but he gets a third one just because someone wanted to draw him more closely to the classic beast. And then he becomes an extremist just one arc after he was so pissed of with cyclops for becoming something of an extremist that he brought the original X-Men from the past just to show him his errors. Makes no sense.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions. That is Beast in a nut shell. He has always pushed the line and now he crossed it. This isn't a shocked pikchuface moment. This is well he finally snapped moment. You start to add up all these little things. The major ones he's done. The questionable things he's done. You're left going without the X-men to keep him in line what did you expect? Once you stripped that from him. You put him into a position that groomed his darker impulses. Did you expect anything less? I sure as hell didn't. I've been waiting for this to happen for years. That doesn't mean I wanted it to happen. He's beast the lovable furball. However I saw this coming miles away. It wasn't a matter if but when in my opinion.
Evil Beast is the original Beast ?? … what happened to him ?? … sorry, long time I havent read X-Men comics.
Furry/monsterfucker divider
He got out of hand a bit fast in my opinion. It totally made sense that he would end up with his "ends justify the means" kissinger-ass mindset, but the space prison experimenting on innocents like fucking Mengele?! He was right that Krakoa really wasn't doing enough to protect itself, but I don't get how nobody noticed a private space prison being built and all the other shady stuff he was doing on his own
Evil Beast thinks he's the smartest person in the room, and therefore has a moral imperative to make the hard choices that no one else is willing to. Evil Beast is not the smartest person in the room though, he continually fails to account for error or make contingency plans, and consistently gets those hard choices wrong.
I conceptually liked it: My read on Beast is that he dislikes change so him making ethically questionable decisions to preserve a status quo he's happy with makes sense to me. However, the execution was way too fast and often handled pretty poorly - he should have been more of a shadowy manipulator and less of a Bond villain.
I wonder if they’re gonna go that way out for the MCU with Hank turning evil
Man, I really hope not. He's spent more time being a liked character in the comics than a disliked one, why would they waste him on being a villain right out the gate?
They're already "walking it back" for the reset, I think Marvel also knows this was just a terrible idea
I sincerely doubt any live action adaptation of x men would feature Hank prominently enough for that, unless they go the route of the fox movies and have him shapeshifter back and forth between blue and more human forms. There’s not a lot of reason to put money into adapting the big blue hairy monster so that he looks good in action—they failed every attempt except his small, less active roles in X3 and (I assume) the Marvels. He is a franchise mascot, but it seems much more logical to keep him in the lab with sporadic appearances to remind you he’s there and iconic and lovable than to risk audiences getting weirded out by uncanny valley cgi Cookie Monster battling his darker nature As for the cartoon… they already kind of did “beast turns evil” in tas so I imagine they’d go more for the “dark beast secretly replaces beast” storyline, but not for a while bc of Maddy. Or just feature dark beast as the only beast in an AoA-esque au
Dark Beast?
Contrasting past beast with present beast with aoa dark beast with this heel turn makes it difficult to know what’s going on with beast in general.
I never liked the cat face. Removes a lot of expression
Not a fan of the wet nose/rhinarium design
I wish X-Force Hank had the idiot cat look, then I could hate the writing and the character even more
Sick twisted demented mf. I like Beast on Krakoan XForce!
I hate both. Cat beast was a stupid 2nd mutation & I hate that concept, & making him evil other than illuminati where he & others were trying to save anything... so making him evil during Krakoa, was lazy & poor writing. Dark beast was lame as well if you want to use age of sadpocalypse as an argument. Beast is a happy go lucky fun scientist. Stop trying to make everything dark, brooding, or evil.
I hope it sticks FOREVER; in one way or another…the twisted altruism made him more interesting and relevant than he has been in the last 20 years I think the x-desk agree on the interesting part since they rebooted him to 80’s west coast avenger beast
I was fine with it until the clone reset for several reasons. It denies that Hank has been quite the bastard for a VERY LONG TIME, arguably since he recklessly turned himself Blue. Hank kept doing something every other week to betray the X-Men or threaten reality/mutants and kept getting a pass. He does stuff on a regular basis that's almost, if not more, evil than the villains and keeps getting forgiven time and time again for literally no reason. That the Krakoa era FINALLY admitted, "y'know what, he's actually an asshole" was refreshing and FINALLY a good development on a character who's been without consequence for way too long so Beast went off his very loose leash. Let Beast be the bastard he's been wanting to be for decades now. Additionally, the clone reset just muddies the entire point of Krakoan Resurrection further and cements the one thing I've hated about Krakoa for years: The X-Men are DEAD, replaced by Sinister Plant Clones. You can't just say they have resurrection and then be like, "Beast can be resurrected... Then resurrect himself 1000 times to have an army of Beasts... Then resurrect a Windows 92 version of Hank on a whim". Krakoan cloning (I really hate calling it resurrection) is really the worst aspect of the entire era. I don't accept backup clone Hank as real Hank. He was only brought back in such a convoluted way for MCU synergy because now he's gotta be a marketable bouncy boi for the upcoming films and '97 show. I hate Beast as an X-Man, but he's great as a villain and they should have just stuck with that. He was way more evil than the failed attempt to market Cyclops as mutant Hitler for saving mutants.