For those who’re not aware of them earlier than asking, you could be stunned if an X-Males comedian reader declares Hank McCoy—the fuzzball genius Beast—one of the evil characters within the franchise. This isn’t a brand new twist, both, even within the wake of X-Men: The Animated Series and the Fox films paving his mainstream status over 20 years in the past: Beast has been on the darkest of paths for years upon years, and now the franchise is trying to cease him.
Though as beforehand famous, the comics model of Hank McCoy has been on a path of morally questionable and often outright evil selections for the reason that ‘90s, Beast’s character arc in the Krakoan Age—the gentle reboot architected by author Jonathan Hickman in 2019, set to return to an in depth this yr forward of a new line-wide refresh—has been outlined by Hank’s embrace of his monstrosity.
Because the director of mutant intelligence and operator for Krakoa’s iteration of X-Force, Hank’s morality within the mutant utopia began out rancid and bought progressively worse. From committing a genocide to neutralize a menace to mutant diplomacy within the nation of Terra Verde—which in the end left Beast puppeteering the nation from the shadows; to using Krakoa’s cloning expertise to create a number of copies of himself to behave as a mutant circuit and soundboard; to staging an nearly infinite litany of backwater assassinations and humant/mutant experimentation, out of his perception that he was getting his fingers soiled for the nice of mutantdom, even Hank’s staunchest allies have discovered him on a path few might be redeemed of.
Within the wake of Krakoa’s fall throughout last year’s Hellfire Gala, Hank has now gone fully rogue, and what stays of X-Power has steeled itself in making an attempt to convey their former director down for his crimes. Which takes us to this week’s X-Power #48, by Ben Percy, Robert Gill, Guru-eFX, and Joe Caramagna, and a short, however essential tangle between the group and Beast. Infiltrating X-Power’s new base on the North Pole to steal Krakoan biotech, X-Power’s brush with Beast shouldn’t be the precise thrust of the difficulty, however what Sage, X-Power’s handler and de facto chief, fears Beast might need nearly discovered: considered one of Beast’s still-intact clones of himself, mendacity in stasis, and ready for a thoughts to be imprinted upon him. Her plan, to the priority of the remainder of X-Power—particularly Wolverine, who’s had plenty of private beef with Hank over his use of clones of him as sock-puppet troopers, as a result of what’s one other horror so as to add to Hank’s infinite listing of them?—is to make use of the one remaining Cerebro backup of Hank’s thoughts, the remainder having been wiped when he went rogue, to create a model of Beast which may be capable to cease the monster he’s turn into within the current.
Like we mentioned although, Hank has been unhealthy. The specter of his experimentation with Mutant Development Hormone and the Legacy Virus, his horrific remedy of Threnody—providing her as much as Mister Sinister for a lifetime of potential mutilation and experimentation—to his affiliation with teams like the Illuminati (and never even to say his siding with the Inhumans when mutantkind confronted potential extinction once more in the course of the Terrigen mists crisis), you’ll be able to’t simply flip Beast’s thoughts again just a few years and assume every thing can be effective. Hell, you’ll be able to’t flip it again just a few a long time and assume it’s going to, both. Fortunately sufficient for Sage, the remaining back-up she has entry to goes even additional than that: to the time Hank was a New Defender. In actual fact, in a uncommon second for Marvel’s perpetually sliding timescale, X-Power #48 offers us an editor’s word to virtually date simply when this Beast-brain comes from: across the time of 1985’s New Defenders #142.
That that is how far again it’s a must to go to have a Beast that wasn’t a large asshole speaks to simply how vile a personality Hank has been, for thus lengthy—however as Wolverine argues to Sage, the issues that make Hank McCoy himself are simply as intrinsic to the Hank of the New Defenders as they’re to the Hank they’re searching within the right here and now. And when she does convey the clone on-line, he nearly instantly proves that—he can say “stars and garters” and bounce round like a furry clown all he desires, however the clone-Beast manages to understand Krakoan expertise and manipulate his would-be-allies alarmingly rapidly, escaping captivity to search out out simply what his “future” self has been as much as. That very same streak, that intelligence, that hazard, continues to be there, however it’s how clone-Beast reacts to what he’s turn into that can determine simply how this battle for Hank McCoy’s very soul will in the end go down.
We’re left to marvel by the tip of X-Power #48, because the clone-Beast wanders out into the frozen wastes alone to confront himself. However a single tear falling from his eye as he reads his darker self’s stories appears to point that X-Power might have discovered a most unlikely ally in its hopes of bringing Beast to job—and X-Males comics might need discovered a pathway to both wresting Hank’s soul from the darkish, or giving him the mom of all do-overs.
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