The X-Men Are Trying to Solve Their Beast Problem in the Wildest Way

If you’re not familiar with them before asking, you might be surprised if an X-Men comic reader declares Hank McCoy—the fuzzball genius Beast—one of the most evil characters in the franchise. This is not a new twist, either, even in the wake of X-Men: The Animated Series and the Fox films paving his mainstream reputation over two decades ago: Beast has been on the darkest of paths for years upon years, and now the franchise is looking to stop him.

Although as previously noted, the comics version of Hank McCoy has been on a path of morally questionable and regularly outright evil choices since the ‘90s, Beast’s character arc in the Krakoan Age—the soft reboot architected by writer Jonathan Hickman in 2019, set to come to a close this year ahead of a new line-wide refresh—has been defined by Hank’s embrace of his monstrosity.

As the director of mutant intelligence and operator for Krakoa’s iteration of X-Force, Hank’s morality in the mutant utopia started out rancid and got progressively worse. From committing a genocide to neutralize a threat to mutant diplomacy in the country of Terra Verde—which ultimately left Beast puppeteering the nation from the shadows; to utilizing Krakoa’s cloning technology to create multiple copies of himself to act as a mutant circuit and soundboard; to staging an almost endless litany of backwater assassinations and humant/mutant experimentation, out of his belief that he was getting his hands dirty for the good of mutantdom, even Hank’s staunchest allies have found him on a path few can be redeemed of.

In the wake of Krakoa’s fall during last year’s Hellfire Gala, Hank has now gone completely rogue, and what remains of X-Force has steeled itself in trying to bring their former director down for his crimes. Which takes us to this week’s X-Force #48, by Ben Percy, Robert Gill, Guru-eFX, and Joe Caramagna, and a brief, but crucial tangle between the team and Beast. Infiltrating X-Force’s new base at the North Pole to steal Krakoan biotech, X-Force’s brush with Beast is not the actual thrust of the issue, but what Sage, X-Force’s handler and de facto leader, fears Beast might have almost found: one of Beast’s still-intact clones of himself, lying in stasis, and waiting for a mind to be imprinted upon him. Her plan, to the concern of the rest of X-Force—especially Wolverine, who’s had a lot of personal beef with Hank over his use of clones of him as sock-puppet soldiers, because what’s another horror to add to Hank’s endless list of them?—is to use the one remaining Cerebro backup of Hank’s mind, the rest having been wiped when he went rogue, to create a version of Beast that might be able to stop the monster he’s become in the present.

Like we said though, Hank has been bad. The specter of his experimentation with Mutant Growth Hormone and the Legacy Virus, his horrific treatment of Threnody—offering her up to Mister Sinister for a life of potential mutilation and experimentation—to his association with groups like the Illuminati (and not even to mention his siding with the Inhumans when mutantkind faced potential extinction again during the Terrigen mists crisis), you can’t just turn Beast’s mind back a few years and think everything will be fine. Hell, you can’t turn it back a few decades and think it will, either. Luckily enough for Sage, the remaining back-up she has access to goes even further than that: to the time Hank was a New Defender. In fact, in a rare moment for Marvel’s perpetually sliding timescale, X-Force #48 gives us an editor’s note to practically date just when this Beast-brain comes from: around the time of 1985’s New Defenders #142.

That this is how far back you have to go to have a Beast that wasn’t a massive asshole speaks to just how vile a character Hank has been, for so long—but as Wolverine argues to Sage, the things that make Hank McCoy himself are just as intrinsic to the Hank of the New Defenders as they are to the Hank they are hunting in the here and now. And when she does bring the clone online, he almost immediately proves that—he can say “stars and garters” and bounce around like a furry clown all he wants, but the clone-Beast manages to grasp Krakoan technology and manipulate his would-be-allies alarmingly quickly, escaping captivity to find out just what his “future” self has been up to. That same streak, that intelligence, that danger, is still there, but it’s how clone-Beast reacts to what he’s become that will decide just how this battle for Hank McCoy’s very soul will ultimately go down.

We’re left to wonder by the end of X-Force #48, as the clone-Beast wanders out into the frozen wastes alone to confront himself. But a single tear falling from his eye as he reads his darker self’s reports seems to indicate that X-Force may have found a very unlikely ally in its hopes of bringing Beast to task—and X-Men comics might have found a pathway to either wresting Hank’s soul from the dark, or giving him the mother of all do-overs.

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