Beast (Marvel Comics)
Beast, the Marvel Comics hero Dr. Henry Philip McCoy, has a greatest fear, and it is a ball of string. In one X-Men story, that fear became a rescue tool. A psychic assault stripped away his higher human consciousness and left only animal instinct. A student named Blindfold then faced him with a high-powered sensory stimulant shaped like a ball of string. Beast and Professor Xavier had built the device together for exactly that emergency.
Hank McCoy is a founding member of the X-Men, the team of mutants trained at Xavier's school. He is a world authority on biochemistry and genetics, the team's doctor, and a science and mathematics teacher. He is also a mutant political activist who campaigns against bigotry toward mutants. He fights with long words and literary references as often as with his fists. Yet his body has changed again and again, and so has his place in the story. Why did his creators pair such a refined mind with such a monstrous body? What did each transformation cost him? And how did a man devoted to a better world for mutants and humans end up as a villain?
Stan Lee and Jack Kirby introduced Beast in X-Men #1, published in September 1963. Lee explained in the foreword to X-Men: The Ultimate Guide that he made Beast the most articulate, eloquent and well-read of the X-Men. The point was contrast with a brutish exterior. The early issues were less polished, though. McCoy leaned on slang before he grew more erudite. Writer Will Murray suggests a possible inspiration in Andrew Blodgett "Monk" Mayfair, a companion of the pulp hero Doc Savage. Like Beast, Monk looks apelike and works as a brilliant scientist. By issue #18, Werner Roth, working under the alias Jay Gavin, had fully replaced Kirby. With new writer Roy Thomas, he won praise for sensitive portrayals of the original team. In issue #39, every member received a colorful, individualized costume.
The fictional biography begins in Dundee, Illinois, where Henry was born to Norton and Edna McCoy. His father worked at a local nuclear power plant and was once exposed to intense radiation. The story suggests that exposure caused his son's mutation. Hank arrived with a vast intellect, unusually long arms and legs, and unusually large hands and feet. Mutant powers showing up before puberty are rare, though not unique. His proportions resembled a gorilla's, and classmates nicknamed him "Magilla Gorilla".
The mutation fully took hold in adolescence, bringing greater strength and agility. He briefly excelled at athletics, but fellow students and other non-mutant humans turned hostile. After he defeated the villain Conquistador with help from some X-Men, he joined Professor Charles Xavier's school. There he trained in the Danger Room and studied subjects from differential equations to Proust. Keeping a secret identity wore on him, and he briefly quit the team to become a professional wrestler. In the ring he met Unus the Untouchable. Back with the X-Men, Hank helped build a directed-energy weapon that left Unus completely untouchable, and unable to feed himself.
In Amazing Adventures vol. 2 #11, dated March 1972, Beast turned furry and blue. His fur was originally grey. Gerry Conway wrote the issue and Tom Sutton drew it. The idea came from Roy Thomas, who wanted a more visibly striking character. Beast also became more werewolf-like, to capitalize on the success of Werewolf by Night.
Inside the story, the change was an accident of ambition. Hank had left the X-Men to work as a research scientist at the Brand Corporation, a genetics research facility. There he isolated a hormonal extract that let anyone become a mutant for a short time. He drank it to disguise himself while foiling an attempt to steal his research. Then he waited too long to reverse the process. The change was permanent. Fur covered his body, along with pointed ears, long canine teeth and claws. He could run on walls and ceilings like a spider. His senses sharpened, a healing factor appeared, and a feral side emerged that he struggled to control.
Steve Englehart wrote the rest of that short-lived solo spotlight. He chose to stress Beast's wit instead of the tragedy of the monstrous form. His reasoning was that intelligence and humor would let Beast see his misfortune in perspective. Hank feared his looks would repel people, but found that many women were drawn to his hirsuteness.
The fur did not stay simple. In X-Factor, a rival called Tower captured Beast and delivered him to Carl Maddicks. Maddicks tested a serum on him in an attempt to cure mutant abilities, and Beast lost his fur. Later, the Horseman Pestilence touched him during a clash with Apocalypse. After that, each use of his strength lowered his intelligence. An attack by Infectia sent him switching between normal and furred forms. He settled into the furred shape with his intellect intact.
In 2001, the body changed again. The new shape appeared in X-Treme X-Men #3 and in the introduction to New X-Men, drawn by Frank Quitely and written by Grant Morrison. In the story, Beast was gravely wounded in an attack by Vargas. During a wave of secondary mutations among mutants, teammate Sage jump-started his. He became feline, with a big cat's head and feet. His senses rose to twenty times a normal human's, and mild to moderate injuries healed within hours. He lost his old dexterity, and remarked that he once played guitar but was now learning drums. A psychic attack by Cassandra Nova left him humiliated, badly beaten, and haunted by the idea that he was devolving. His longtime girlfriend, Trish Tilby, ended their relationship.
Morrison cited Chris Claremont, who wrote The Uncanny X-Men for sixteen consecutive years, as an inspiration. Morrison described Beast as a "brilliant, witty bipolar scientist" with a sense of humor that is "dark and oblique". He added that Beast swings between manic excitement and ghastly self-doubt. In Morrison's view, he had no dark secrets and nothing to hide.
Steve Englehart wanted to write Beast again, so he added him to the Avengers roster. He thought the character's funny, down-to-earth personality would make a good foil for Moondragon. Later Avengers writers agreed. Beast's lightheartedness balanced the team's generally serious tone. His Avengers run ended up outlasting his first stretch with the X-Men. Among fans, his friendship with Wonder Man came to eclipse his friendship with X-Man Iceman.
The Avengers #137, from July 1975, debuted his catchphrase, "Oh, my stars and garters." The Avengers #164, from October 1977, was the first to portray him as a sex symbol. Writer Jim Shooter said that take brought very positive mail from female readers in particular.
His time as an Avenger ended for a practical reason. The team had a six-member limit then, and he stepped aside so new recruits could fill the roster. He joined the Defenders and stayed to organize a "new" Defenders. He was among the last survivors when the first version disbanded after a battle with Moondragon and the Dragon of the Moon. Angel and Iceman, fellow survivors, soon heard from Cyclops and Marvel Girl, Jean Grey. They were forming a new group called X-Factor. In 1986 the original X-Men reunited in that team, and in 1991, in X-Factor #70 and X-Men #1, Beast returned to the X-Men itself.
Avengers duty came back in the 2010s. Beast was a regular in Secret Avengers from issue #1 in July 2010 to its last issue, #37, in March 2013. On Steve Rogers' covert ops squad, he joined a mission to Mars and helped Shang-Chi. He also played a key part in the capture, interrogation and "un-brainwashing" of John Steele.
Hank McCoy was turning thirty and doubting everything he had accomplished. Then came Stryfe's fatal Legacy Virus, one of Beast's greatest challenges. He felt shut out when Professor Xavier and Moira MacTaggert did not ask for his help with the research. In fact, Xavier was simply giving him privacy. Hank had always believed that, given time, he could solve any problem, and the virus became an obsession. He made an unethical choice, handing Mister Sinister information on the virus. Sinister had more resources and fewer morals to hold him back.
The turning point involved Dark Beast, an alternate universe version of Beast. Dark Beast imprisoned Hank, took his place for a while, and finished part of the formula. MacTaggert then discovered that Mystique had irresponsibly manipulated virus strains. The cure was still incomplete, and it fell to Beast to design the final version from Moira's notes. The anti-virus required a mutant to die. Colossus chose to give his life to release the remedy.
The man who solved it holds PhDs in Biophysics and Genetics. He has no medical degree, yet he serves as field medic and in-house physician for the X-Men. His expertise in genetics rivals that of Xavier, MacTaggert and Kavita Rao. Even so, he has never received a Nobel Prize or been elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences. He is fluent in English, German, French, Latin, Spanish, Japanese, Arabic and Russian, plus the fictional language Latverian. He likes to quote Shakespeare. He often repairs Cerebro and upgrades the Danger Room, and he has built devices on par with Reed Richards, including one that strips entities of cosmic powers. Business magazine BusinessWeek listed him among the ten most intelligent fictional characters in American comics.
His most startling feat came against the Red Skull. The Skull had grafted a fragment of Charles Xavier's brain onto himself. Beast performed brain surgery to extract it, removing the Skull's telepathic abilities and leaving the villain otherwise apparently healthy.
In Joss Whedon's Astonishing X-Men arc "Gifted", Indian Benetech scientist Dr. Kavita Rao unveils a "mutant cure". The prospect of looking "real" human tempts a heavily mutated Beast. He seriously considers taking it. Wolverine urges him hard against it, since an X-Man taking the cure would send mutants a negative message. Beast visits Rao and learns the drug came from illegal experimentation on others, and he helps take down her operation. The idea of a mutant cure had already appeared in the 1992 animated series. It became the plot of the film X-Men: The Last Stand and was made into a motion comic. IGN called the arc "best X-Men run in a decade" and praised Whedon's character dynamics.
When a Civil War split Marvel's heroes, Beast and the other X-Men stayed neutral. He privately broke that stance by giving Spider-Man a holographic disguise. It let Spider-Man keep teaching at Midtown High after his secret identity was exposed. After the war, Beast joined the Initiative program to help train the next generation of superheroes.
On Alcatraz Island, Norman Osborn held Beast and Professor X prisoner. Beast became a test subject for the Omega Machine, a device Dark Beast designed to eradicate mutant powers and place them in Weapon Omega. He grew weaker and lost his claws. The X-Men rescued him, but his faith in Cyclops had frayed. He objected to methods such as letting Magneto join the team, and he left the X-Men. At the funeral of Nightcrawler, he confronted Scott Summers and blamed his militant attitude for the death. During the Avengers vs. X-Men mini-series, he sided with the Avengers against the Phoenix Force, then briefly resigned in protest over how they treated the "Phoenix Five".
A later crisis sent him backward in time. Beast was apparently dying from side effects of his artificially accelerated secondary mutation. A chance comment from Iceman gave him an idea: the young Cyclops would never tolerate his present self's actions. So Beast traveled back to the early days of the Xavier Institute and brought the original five X-Men into the future. He then lapsed into a coma. Jean's telepathy, accelerated by the trauma of the trip, linked the minds of the two Hanks. The younger Hank spotted a mistake in his older self's calculations, and Beast was stabilized as a blue-furred, ape-like figure. The young X-Men stayed and became the All-New X-Men, except Angel, who joined Cyclops' Uncanny X-Men.
In the Death of X storyline, Cyclops visited Muir Island and found that every mutant there had died painfully. Beast diagnosed the cause: the Terrigen cloud, the substance that gives Inhumans their powers, had turned toxic to mutants. He worked with the Inhumans to find a safe version, became a trusted ally and joined their counsel.
The Dark Beast, sometimes called the Black Beast, comes from the Age of Apocalypse. He is a Marvel Comics supervillain and an evil alternative to Hank. He was a recurring character in comics of the 2000s and 2010s. Other universes offer different warnings.
In the Ultimate X-Men, Beast was born with hand-like feet. He tried to make a cure for his mutation, and it only made things worse. His parents denounced him through his childhood, so he hid his immense intelligence. As the team's elite engineer, he upgraded the Blackbird X-Jet and the Danger Room. After Weapon X operated on him, he gained blue fur and sharper senses. Sentinels killed him and he was resurrected, and Xavier and Nick Fury kept his survival secret. In Ultimatum #1, he drowned in Magneto's flooding of New York. In the future seen in Battle of the Atom, Beast has a horn, and one side of his head looks more feral than the other. He has defected to the Brotherhood while blaming himself for an unspecified catastrophe.
In the main Marvel universe, the Krakoan Age of the 2020s turned the warning into reality. Beast's determination to protect Krakoa led him to increasingly ambiguous actions. He created multiple clones of himself and Wolverine, in violation of Krakoan protocols. The Beast clones served as a "think tank". He pushed the Logan clones into a more feral state so he could use them as attack dogs. The "prime" Logan broke free of Hank's influence and killed most of the surplus Beast clones. Hank went on the run.
Wolverine and X-Force found that Beast had deleted most of his Cerebro back-ups so he could not be tracked. They settled for the latest one available. That version of Hank dated from his early time with the Avengers, so he had no memory of his later actions. Joining forces with Wonder Man, the young Beast tracked down his older self. The older Beast died saving Wonder Man from a weapon he had created, in an act of last-minute redemption.
The clone lived on. With Krakoa lost and most mutants in the White Hot Room, he joined Cyclops' team in the old Weapon X facility in Alaska. He asked others, including Tony Stark, how his older self had been allowed to fall so far.
The original had not died, however. At the end of the "Age of Revelation" storyline, he turned out to be the chairman of 3K, an organization that intends to give mutant abilities to humans. He had been brought into a possible future in place of his clone. There he learned about the X-Virus created by Revelation. Back in the present, after failing with Cyclops to stop Revelation from assimilating Earth, he planned to recreate the X-Virus and use it to his advantage.
Wizard magazine ranked Beast the 180th-greatest comic book character of all time in its Top 200 list. IGN ranked him the 9th-greatest X-Men member in 2006. It said he is ironically one of the most human X-Men, and that he shuts himself in the lab to avoid rejection over his looks. In 2011 IGN ranked him the 58th-greatest comic book hero, stating that "Beast embodies everything about the mutant struggle in the Marvel Universe." In 2012 it placed him seventh among the Top 50 Avengers. Entertainment Weekly put him seventh on its 2014 list ranking every X-Man.
On television, George Buza voiced him in X-Men: The Animated Series, which ran from 1992 to 1997. Buza returned in the revival X-Men '97, which began in 2024. Buza also voiced him in Spider-Man: The Animated Series. In X-Men: Evolution, voiced by Michael Kopsa, Beast first appears as a chemistry and gym teacher at Bayville High School. He uses a serum to suppress his mutation until its effects weaken, then regains his mind with help from Charles Xavier and Spyke. Fred Tatasciore voiced him in Wolverine and the X-Men. A Japanese-language Marvel Anime: X-Men gave him his blue feline form.
Film took longer. Beast appeared in early drafts of X-Men from 2000 but was removed for budget reasons, so studios could greenlight the film. His medical expertise and political activism went into the character of Jean Grey instead. Steve Bacic played a cameo as Dr. Hank McCoy in X2. In X-Men: The Last Stand in 2006, Kelsey Grammer played him as U.S. Secretary of Mutant Affairs, a cabinet member. He resigned to defend the cure's production facility on Alcatraz Island. Afterward he became ambassador to the United Nations.
In X-Men: First Class in 2011, Nicholas Hoult played a young McCoy working for the CIA's Division X. Benjamin Walker had originally been cast, but dropped out to star in the Broadway musical Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson. This McCoy fell in love with Mystique and made a serum from her DNA to cure himself. It turned him into a blue-furred, feline form, and teammate Havok gave him the name Beast. In X-Men: Days of Future Past in 2014, both Hoult and Grammer appeared. A viral marketing website for that film said Beast was killed in 2015 by a mob of protesters outside his upstate New York home. Hoult reprised the role in X-Men: Apocalypse in 2016, Deadpool 2 in 2018 and Dark Phoenix in 2019. A self-titled spin-off with Hoult was in development but canceled.
Beast has also been a playable character in many video games, from X-Men: Mutant Apocalypse to Lego Marvel Super Heroes and Marvel Super War. He has been an action figure from Toy Biz and Hasbro and a Lego minifigure. In the Marvel Cinematic Universe film The Marvels in 2023, an alternate universe Hank McCoy appears in a mid-credits scene, again played by Kelsey Grammer. In that scene, he works with Maria Rambeau, known as Binary, to investigate incursions. Grammer is set to return as Beast in Avengers: Doomsday, scheduled for 2026.
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Common questions
Who created Beast in Marvel Comics?
Writer Stan Lee and artist and co-writer Jack Kirby created Beast. He first appeared in X-Men #1, published in September 1963.
What are Beast's powers in Marvel Comics?
Beast has superhuman strength, speed, agility and enhanced senses, along with a genius-level intellect. His feline form raised his senses to twenty times those of a normal human and gave him an accelerated healing factor.
Why does Beast have blue fur in Marvel Comics?
Beast turned furry and blue after drinking a serum he made at the Brand Corporation and then waiting too long to reverse it. The change first appeared in Amazing Adventures vol. 2 #11 in March 1972, and his fur was originally grey.
Who is Hank McCoy in the X-Men?
Dr. Henry Philip "Hank" McCoy is Beast, a founding X-Men member, the team's medical doctor, and a science and mathematics teacher at the Xavier Institute. He is also a world authority on biochemistry and genetics.
How did Beast cure the Legacy Virus?
Beast designed the final anti-virus from Moira MacTaggert's notes after a long, obsessive effort. Its use required a mutant to die, and Colossus chose to sacrifice his life to release the remedy.
Does Beast become a villain in Marvel Comics?
Yes, during the Krakoan Age of the 2020s, Beast becomes an outright villain. He creates clones of himself and Wolverine in violation of Krakoan protocols. The original Beast later turns up as the chairman of 3K.
Who plays Beast in the X-Men movies?
Kelsey Grammer played Beast in X-Men: The Last Stand in 2006, and Nicholas Hoult played a younger version in X-Men: First Class in 2011. Grammer also reprised the role in The Marvels in 2023 and is set to appear in Avengers: Doomsday.
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