In X-Men (Vol. 7) #1, Beast makes an offhand reference to Chief Paula Robbins of having never experienced Krakoa for himself. For anyone who didn’t read (or has forgotten) Ben Percy’s X-Force run, this is because Beast as he currently exists is a clone of the original Beast. Specifically, he is a clone created with a backup memory that stops during his time with the New Defenders (circa 1985/1986 in real world time). That means there’s a whole host of stuff — everything that happened during the Krakoa Era, but also, everything that happened in the over thirty years of continuity before it — that present day Beast no longer remembers.
Unfortunately for Mama McCoy’s bashful bouncing boy, even before the original Beast became a bona fide genocidal war criminal in the name of defending mutants and Krakoa, he did a lot of other … questionable stuff. Here then, for Beast’s benefit and yours, is a refresher of nine notable morally dubious, ill-advised and/or outright criminal actions waiting to be rediscovered in Beast’s personal history book.
Jean Grey Is Alive
This one isn’t a crime or even an action on Beast’s part, but it’s worth noting that while the current Beast has probably already interacted with her and been caught up on the details, when he was first “activated,” he had no idea Jean Grey was alive. His last memories of Jean Grey would have been her sacrifice on the moon at the climax of “The Dark Phoenix Saga,” meaning he also doesn’t know that wasn’t Jean, but rather a cosmic simulacrum, etc.
Hunting Mutants to Save Mutants
After the New Defenders shut down, Beast rejoined his original X-Men teammates in a new superhero team and public organization, X-Factor. In a riff on Ghostbusters, the original premise of X-Factor involved the notion that the mutant heroes would present themselves as humans running an organization that hunted down and captured mutants for profit. In reality, this would all be a front, a way for them to learn about mutants in need of help (since they didn’t have a Cerebro) and take them under their wing for further training under the guise of “neutralizing” the mutants they captured.
While on paper the idea of using anti-mutant prejudice to their benefit seems OK, in practice, the public-facing actions of the mutant-hunting X-Factor simply fanned the flames of anti-mutant hysteria. To Beast’s credit, none of his teammates recognized this problem either. To Beast’s detriment, none of his teammates are geniuses. That the whole ruse turned out to be designed to fan the flames of anti-mutant hysteria orchestrated by X-Factor’s PR man/Angel’s old buddy/secret anti-mutant zealot/future cyborg spider man Cameron Hodge surprised no one half as much as it did Beast and the actual members of X-Factor.
All Yours, Mister Sinister
In the mid-’90s, Beast spent most of his time embroiled in the Legacy Virus subplot. A deadly virus whose release was orchestrated by Stryfe, Cable’s sharply dressed evil twin, the Legacy Virus became a plague on mutants, then humans, then readers (It lingered as a subplot with lots of narrative false starts and dead ends FOR YEARS).
For Beast, this meant lots of time in a lab, stressing over his inability to devise a cure. Occasionally though, he ventured out, as in X-Men (Vol. 2) #27. Here, Beast and Iceman meet up with their old X-Factor foe Infectia, who is dying of the Legacy Virus. Along the way, they meet Threnody, an unhoused mutant with the ability to sense dying people and be … energized by their death energy, sort of? (Threnody’s powers are weird and vague). Both Beast and Mister Sinister recognized that Threnody could be a useful asset in the fight against the Legacy Virus, and vied for her loyalty. Ultimately, Beast let Sinister take the young woman under his wing, on the grounds that the less ethical Sinister might benefit from her help more because he’d cross lines Beast wouldn’t. Which feels a bit like Beast cutting off his moral nose to spite his moral face.
Not Interested, Miss Tilby
In New X-Men #125, Beast tells his on-again, off-again girlfriend, reporter Trish Tilby, that he’s gay. Then, a few issues later, in New X-Men #134, he admits he just said that to make her mad but decided to continue to fake being gay because of some ill-advised reasoning about universal trauma and discrimination. All in all, not a great moment for ol’ Hank.
No More Mutants
In the wake of 2005’s House of M and the elimination by the Scarlet Witch of all the mutants who weren’t needed to headline a line of comic books for Marvel, Beast took on a “cure the Legacy Virus” style personal mission to roll back the change and restore mutantkind. After hitting up all his buddies in the heroic super-scientific community and getting nowhere, he reached out to all his not-buddies in the villainous super-scientific community.
That approach led to similar results, culminating in Beast working alongside his evil genocidal alternate reality counterpart, the Dark Beast from the Age of Apocalypse. Beast eventually parted ways with Dark Beast after Dark Beast started conducting tests on children, but he’d already crossed plenty of other red lines before taking a stand at that one.
No More Skrulls
When Skrulls invaded Earth during the Secret Invasion crossover event, it fell to the X-Men to defend their newly adopted hometown of San Francisco from a Skrull fleet. With their backs against the wall, Beast dug into his old Legacy Virus research and modified the virus to affect Skrulls. Cyclops then deployed it against the Skrull fleet, prompting them to kill themselves rather than risk infecting other Skrulls. It was ultimately Cyclops’ call to deploy the weaponized virus, and Beast wasn’t happy about it, but he still made the virus and gave it to Cyclops.
Height of Hypocrisy
A variety of escalating crises and morally dubious actions by Cyclops, like the decision to use the Legacy Virus against the Skrulls and, in particular, the reincorporation of X-Force as Cyclops’ personal black-ops squad, led Beast to walk away from the X-Men for a time. Ironically, after he left, he fell back in with the Avengers. There, he was asked to join the Secret Avengers, Captain America’s special … black ops squad.
Back to the Future
Cyclops’ zeal in protecting mutantkind from ever-escalating threats eventually led to a wider schism among the X-Men after Beast’s departure, leading Wolverine to establish a school for young mutants back in New York. Beast joined him there, and fought alongside Wolverine and the Avengers when they battled the X-Men over the fate of Hope Summers and the Phoenix Force in Avengers vs. X-Men. This culminated in Cyclops, possessed by the Phoenix Force, killing Professor X, after which he became even more militant and unrepentant despite being free of Phoenix’s influence.
Beast lit on the brilliant (?) idea of pulling his younger self and the other original X-Men out of the past, hoping to muck with time and change the present. Beyond his willing manipulation of the space-time continuum, he also manipulated his younger self and his friends, leading them to believe Cyclops killed Xavier of his own volition, and initially obscuring the fact that he also hoped his younger self would help stabilize an additional mutation that was threatening the life of the older Beast. So it quickly became a case of self-serving lies on top of self-serving lies that also threatened to destroy time.
Worlds Collide
Following Xavier’s death, his membership in the Illuminati, a secret group of powerful and influential superheroes who secretly protected and guided the world, including Iron Man, Doctor Strange and Mister Fantastic, passed to Beast. As part of the group, Beast worked alongside them battling the growing threat of incursions, incidents in which alternate realities collided into one another, with Earth as their epicenter. As these incursions escalated, the Illuminati, including Beast, destroyed entire realities to save their own, making Beast culpable to multiversal genocide on a scale unlike any other.
Dark Beast Redux
And then, of course, there’s pretty much all of the Krakoan era, in which Beast ran X-Force as a black ops “mutant CIA,” lobotomized Terra Verde’s First Son to set up the nation as a Krakoan puppet state, killed Omega Red in cold blood, conducted clandestine human and mutant experimentation, opened a secret space prison, killed Wolverine to resurrect him in a way that would make him Beast’s personal agent, destroyed an entire United Nations submarine and its crew, and tried to use a black hole gun to effectively exile Arrako/Mars “for its own good.”
All in all, while the current “New Defenders Beast” is probably legitimately sad about having not experienced the good of Krakoa, in the long run, it’s probably a worthy price to pay for not having to remember all the bad of his former self.
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Austin Gorton also reviews older issues of X-Men at the Real Gentlemen of Leisure website, co-hosts the A Very Special episode podcast, and likes Star Wars. He lives outside Minneapolis, where sometimes, it is not cold. Follow him on Twitter @AustinGorton
