Hank McCoy has traditionally skirted the lines of morality, but many of his most recent actions have pushed him deep into irredeemable territory.
Hank McCoy, aka Beast, is a veteran member of Marvel’s premier mutant team, first appearing beside the rest of the team in Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s X-Men #1 in 1963. Since that time the character has evolved from a happy-go-lucky student of the Xavier Institute to an esteemed professor and member of Earth’s Mightiest Heroes, the Avengers. These facts of the character make it even harder to accept his fall from grace.
The reality is that Beast has faced many difficult challenges in his life. These challenges have tested the idea of him as the slightly irresponsible genius, and have pushed him over the edge on more than one occasion. In fact, Beast has made so many morally questionable decisions, especially as of late, that it’s unlikely he can ever totally come back from the brink.
Beast’s descent into darkness began with the Legacy Virus. After the growing frustration of being kept away from working on the deadly contagion by Charles Xaver and Moira MacTaggert, he felt disheartened when his efforts were unable to foster a cure. Believing that he should be able to solve any solution with time and effort, Beast’s pursuit of a cure became an unhealthy obsession.
This obsession with the Legacy Virus led him to do something almost unthinkable for a hero. A young mutant named Threnody could use her powers to see the effects of the Legacy Virus on others. Hank sees her abilities and briefly abandons his ethics, handing her over to the villainous Mr. Sinister. His reasoning? It was not just because Sinister had better resources — it was because he didn’t have morals to stand in the way of his research. This was the first step Beast took away from his heroic path, and was to be the first of many.
Another event with far-reaching implications on the mutant community became Hank’s next obsession — M-Day. In Endangered Species by Mike Carey and Scot Eaton, Beast tries to reverse Scarlet Witch’s three word eradication of mutants. However when searching for help, Beast did not go to his friends, but instead sought the help of the world’s most ingenious villains. He even aligns himself with the evil alternate reality version of himself, the Dark Beast.
These events led to other decisions that get farther from justifiable or even understandable. During Jonathan Hickman and Esad Ribic’s Secret Wars, Beast joined the Illuminati and became a willing participant in actions that were so reprehensible that Captain America actively opposed the group. Those actions? The destruction of entire universes. While it was done to stop their own universe from being destroyed, their actions were still unquestionably wrong.
Beast’s machinations with the Illuminati are not the only outrageous things he has done. In the All-New X-Men series by Brian Michael Bendis and Stuart Immonen, Beast meddled with the fabric of time by bringing the original X-Men of the past to the future. Though Beast does this in the hopes of doing something good before he dies, the reasoning for his actions is not just reckless and petty, but searching for an easy solution to a complex problem.
Coming into the most recent X-Force series by Ben Percy, Joshua Cassara and Dean White, it can be said that Beast has fully lost his moral compass. Many of his actions in the current series put him in direct opposition with the rest of the team. However, many of his actions come from a place of genuine concern. For example in issue #12, Beast believes Xavier is too naive to trust the mutants of Krakoa, which is understandable, but his response to the situation is to enforce police state tactics upon them.
Beast wants to round up any mutants with ties to Russia, including his own teammate Colossus, and make a public example of doing so. Wolverine violently disagrees, punching his longtime friend. He eventually apologizes to Colossus but this doesn’t negate stopping a lead scientist by putting them in a vegetative state or considering turning Krakoa’s mutations into a dirty bomb. At this point, even though Hank McCoy believes he still has his moral compass, it is truly gone.
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