I was really hoping we’d finally see long-awaited capsule reviews for New Teen Titans v.2 #24-25 and #34; Doom Patrol v.1 #115-116; and The Boys #23-29.
I fear that the X-books are doomed though, as not one made the Top 500 comics for the week. That has never happened in the history of comics.
Time for desperate measures. Bring on the Chuck Austen revival run.
I don’t fear that. I would *love* to see that! I would love for someone in charge to finally say, “Alright, look, this whole X-Men-as-an-entire-line-of-books isn’t really working anymore.” and roll it all the way back to X-Men-as-a-series. One book only. Six to eight main cast members, tops. I might actually read X-Men again.
It’ll never happen, obviously. The only doom in the X-Men’s foreseeable future is the upcoming Avengers: Doomsday film.
@Chris V.: Presumably someone at the X-book factory will have cleared the blockage by April, allowing all the backed-up issues to cascade messily onto the conveyor belt.
Wonder how shops in the states were effected this week by the storms.Being not all that far from Diamond HQ, I know most everything was shut down Monday and parts of Tuesday. Not sure how the distribution system works these days with the other vendors and early ship dates, etc.
Mark-As far as I know, nothing was delayed this week. It’s just a fifth week of the month and the “Shadows of Tomorrow” relaunch is just kicking off, so Marvel scheduling being what it is there were six X-books last week and no X-books this week. Ours is not to question why, Marvel knows best.
Unless you mean how individual stores were affected.
About a month ago, there was a week with no DC books. This week, no X-books. I remember the days of fifth week events, now we have fifth week publishing shrugs.
Huh. So it is. It’s been a long month…
I saw the new Iron Man #1 came out this week. Maybe Marvel was concerned about another IM series getting cancelled after ten issues.
I meant individual stores. I talked to (friend of the pod) Joe Sposto and he said their store got their stuff over the weekend before the storm hit.
I haven’t been a Wednesday buyer in years and years, and 20+ years since I worked in a store, so the logistics of the modern comics shipping business are not my forte.
Do we the sales for Krakow when in decline and just before the editorial decision to bring the era to a close? I’m interested how they compare for the previous ten years, and also to now.
Basically, did they trade in low but steady sales (and fan acclaim) for this car crash?
I’m ignoring the narrative point that Hickman had a beginning middle and end planned. That ship sailed!
P.s. the concept of Austen as a high watermark to return to both terrifies and strangely thrills me. In retrospect the camp melodrama was actually a contrast to the other more serious books. Still utterly trashy, but memorable all for it
@Evilgus- In June 2023, the month before the last Hellfire Gala, X-Men 23 came in 9th, immortal X-Men came in 19th, Wolverine came in 32nd, X-Men Red came in 40th and X-Force came in 62nd. In May 2023, X-Men 22 came in 11tth, Immortal X-Men came in 15th, Wolverine came in 25th, X-Men Red came in 33rd and X-Force came in 57th. (Don’t ask how badly the Betsy Braddock: Captain Britain series did.)
It does seem like the top titles were selling better under Krakoa than under Brevoort’s reign.
(Although it’s interesting that even under Krakoa, Marvel had trouble making an X-Force title sell well.)
To be fair, they had a lot less competition also. It seemed like DC was having a hard time selling anything except Batman titles before “All In” and “Absolute”.
The current top X-books might be selling at the same level as the doldrums of Krakoa had DC not figured out how to attract fans again.
I was surprised that my comic shop had Uncanny and Storm (along with Endgame #2 and others). This was a week before they were supposed to come out according to League of Comic Geeks. So I’m wondering if things got jumbled, at least in the states.
As mentioned above, the ‘mutants suck, Inhumans rule’ era had five ongoing x-titles. The first phase of Krakoa had six ongoings (well, five + the Fallen Angels disaster).
Brevoort’s From the Ashes also had six ongoings… for team books alone.
Unlimited has a reading guide on Wonder Man at the moment. It includes the issue where it’s implied that Beast attended a three day long orgy. Beast was such a happy, fun character back then, strongly moral, maybe the most human of the Avengers (ironically). Now we have this bumbling shell of a man and/or a psychopath. Where is the heart?
Scott> I was surprised that my comic shop had Uncanny and Storm (along with Endgame #2 and others). This was a week before they were supposed to come out according to League of Comic Geeks. So I’m wondering if things got jumbled, at least in the states.
Nah, the post-Diamond distributors tend to ship early. Shops are MEANT to keep them in the back room and not sell them till the appropriate Wednesday, but….
The real reason they call him “Beast.”
I’m pretty sure they retconned the “happy, bouncy” Beast of the Avengers era as “secretly hiding his pain at being a furry freak and overcompensating with humor” or something. As opposed to him just… y’know, enjoying it.
I still miss the New Defenders era Beast. He was a lot of fun. Of course that led him into X-Factor… and the whole turned human/stronger-but-losing intelligence/turned furry again cycle.
When Beast was a member of the New Defenders he was interested in the Church of the Sub-Genius. Now, the Beast is far too serious to ever reference something like JR “Bob” Dobbs. Considering his life trajectory from the time of joining X-Factor, being involved with the depressing affairs of mutants is very bad for Hank McCoy. Better to have left it to those already too badly damaged like Scott, Jean, and Xavier. It’s far too late for the orgy-loving, “Slack” Beast of the New Defenders day.
In ye olden days of shops, breaking street date was a big NoNo.if diamond caught you, IIRC, they could not ship your books ahead of time so might or might not get them on Wednesday, they also employed secret shoppers to try and catch stores they thought might be in violation. And they either had or were planning on having a narc line where you could rat out a store that was doing it.
@wwk5d- That’s not completely off topic- he did do New Mutants for a year, after all. He did the issues which introduced Magma, Selene, and the Hellions.
Apropos of nothing, but I was glancing through some Krakoa-era Wolverine and X-Force last night, and… man. Do you think at any point, some editor was tempted to just say, “No. I’m sorry, but no. We CAN’T do this. There are morally ambiguous characters, there are characters who might realistically slip down the moral slope into full-on True Evil. Hank McCoy is not one of them. This character, who was frequently the moral center of whatever team he was on, simply would not do these things, no matter what.”
Fans wouldn’t shut up about it for a decade plus when Hal Jordan went genocidal, but at least he had the excuse of his city being destroyed while he was gone. And as far as rehabilitation efforts, “possessed by yellow fear monster” definitely ranks higher on the absolution scale than “uh, we just downloaded a pre-evil version from the past.”
Damnit. That one hits right in the childhood. I was a Hulk nut while the TV series was running and Sal was the regular artist on Incredible Hulk at the time.
@Drew I really think it was supposed to be Dark Beast in disguise as a “shocking” twist and readers all guessed it way too soon (took it for granted, really) so they pivoted to it being the real Hank after all.
Sal Buscema was great. He went unrecognized for a while because he was compared to his brother John and (more often) because he spent a lot of years being stretched thin because he was fast, dependable, and a lucid storyteller.
ut he had a distinctive and effective storytelling style. In particular, he provided some great, intense “facial acting” in his art for those mid-1990s Spider-Man stories he collaborated on with J.M. DeMatteis.
@Omar – Spot on. Sal could convey wonderfully effective expressions of shock, fear, horror, rage, etc, in characters. Granted, it was usually the same expression each time, but he made it work.
I really liked his time on New Mutants, brief as it was, for all the reasons listed above. He was able to render believable teenagers with recognizable facial expressions in dynamic situations.
Sienkiewicz was obviously quite a departure from Buscema’s down-to-earth style, but the comparison shows that both approaches had their strengths.
@Drew, yezhe- By the time Percy’s X-Force run started, Hank hadn’t been the morally upstanding Beast in a long time. The darkening of Hank’s character started in Endangered Species in 2007. Hank offers his services to villains like MODOK, Sinister and the Sugar Man if they will help him reverse the Decimation.After being rebuffed, he eventually agrees to work with the Dark Beast, who he takes to the Guthries’ home. Hank turns against the Dark Beast when he tries to use the Guthries as guinea pigs. Later on., during Secret Invasion, at Cyclops’
urging. he agrees to use the Legacy Virus against the Skrulls. Still later, in Ellis’s Astonishing X-Men, fearing of an invasion from an alternate Earth, Beast and Brand use a space laser to kill everything within a 10-mile radius of the originating point on that alternate Earth.
This should be taken as a sign how far Beast had fallen. Back in New Defenders. ,he objected to Moondragon merging Professor Power’s mind with his insane son’s to stop Power. Now, he was willing to kill everything within a 10-mile radius, and maybe even kill everyone on that alternate Earth.
What caused writers to suddenly darken Hank’s character? First. there was the Dark Beast, who was introduced in the 1994 as an evil alternate version of Hank. Then in the 2004 Here Comes Tomorrow storyline by Morrison, the villain was Beast, who became possessed by Sublime after taking the drug Kick. Then, during Astonishing X-Men, Whedon had Beast start dating Abigail Brand, who was incredible ruthless. Omar has also suggested that there’s a tendency in comics to portray geniuses as villains. That’s why Martin Stein got retconned into being secretly behind Ronnie’s transformation into Firestorm despite how little sense it made. (Stein had never been portrayed as that kind of Manipulative Bastard. Plus, in the original depictions of Firestorm’s origins, there’s no way Stein could have arranged for Ronnie to be at the reactor if Stein didn’t have superpowers.)
When Bendis took over X-Men, Hank’s darker character traits were stressed. Hank endangered the entire timeline just to teach Scott a lesson by bringing the Original Five to the present. Meanwhile, over in New Avengers. which was written by Hickman, Hank became a member of the Illuminati and engaged in all sorts of questionable behavior to stop the Incursions. Even Young Hank showed a dark side- Young Hank engaged in black magic.
Characters repeatedly stressed what a dark path Hank was going down. The Watcher showed up just to tell Hank how disgusted he was at Hank. In Uncanny X-Men 600, the X-Men hold an intervention for Hank and tell him he’s turning into Dark Beast.
But Hank didn’t learn anything, since he collaborated with fascists during Secret Empire.
Percy’s and White’s intentions in creating the Beast storyline during the Krakoan Era were to bring an end to Hank’s continued darkening by having him become a Full Villain, killing him off and replacing him with a clone whose memories ended before the writers darkened his character. Unfortunately, Percy took forever to bring the Beast storyline to a close. And by the time he was ready to finish it, Brevoort was taking over as X-editor. Brevoort thought that an evil Beast would make a great foe for the X-Men, and thought killing Hank off and replacing him with a younger clone was a copout, so he had Percy leave room for Evil Beast to survive. And that’s how we got to where we are now.
The irony is that one of the inspirations for the Beast’s darker portrayal was the Dark Beast and now the Dark Beast has been made redundant.
If the editors wanted to stop the villainization of Hank McCoy. they should have done something over a decade ago.
I think it’s just a tendency to darken superheroes since the 21st century started. Instead of Watchmen being a warning about what superheroes could have become in the real-world, comic publishers (maybe especially Marvel) decided to show that superheroes operated above the law and were not to be trusted.
Hank McCoy may have ended up an extreme case, but then again, that may be because Percy got his hands on Beast, and Percy doesn’t understand subtlety and sees everything in black and white (Moira with shades of grey? What’s that? Nah. She’s a psychopath). Besides which, as stated above, the point seems to be to have been to revert Beast back to his old self.
I believe this was the beginning of the downward trend for “mainstream” comic book sales. “Civil War” was probably the most damaging moment in Marvel history, as it seemed like from that point for two decades the superheroes spent more time fighting against each other than they did fighting supervillains. I don’t see the typical superhero fan being interested in seeing this (something like Watchmen every so often is fine as an alternate vision rather than the stories in every issue of every superhero book), as they want to see Good Guys beating up Bad Guys.
As someone who wrote academically on the topic, I’d definitely it starts in the 80s with not just Dark Knightnand Watchmen, but also Miracleman and the rise of Wolverine and Punisher as anti-heroes. Maybe some of the 2000 AD stuff too and some of the independent critical favorites like American Flagg. And then in the 90s, you get actual villains being given solo books like Venom, Lobo and others.
I think it’s pretty natural to look at a genius superhero and think, “What if he/she knows something that the other characters don’t?” I don’t mean scientifically speaking. I mean behind-the-scenes stuff. It may have been that line of thinking that led Morrison to come up with the idea that the Chief had been a mad bastard all along back when he was on Doom Patrol.
Also, genius and villainy seem to go together like chocolate and peanut butter. Think of how many times you’ve heard or read the phrase “evil genius” somewhere. You never hear “good genius” much (or at all, really).
Also, making the hero less clever and less knowledgeable than the villain is a very easy way to make the hero the underdog. Writing a smart hero means either writing even smarter villains.
Part of the issue is that superhero comics writers always go to the extreme. No one is “just” brilliant in a specific area, such as engineering or biology; they’re always a master of all fantastical sciences AND they can predict the behavior of other people to the nanosecond AND they’re foresighted enough to prepare for virtually every eventuality.
This was really blatant in the Silver Age, when we saw things like Donald Blake, MD, building sapient robots in his spare time. But it’s present in comics well after that.
Honestly, the 90s and beyond comic-book geniuses are arguably even less interesting than the 1960s “build whatever bespoke thingus” geniuses. These days, comic-book genius characters fall into tedious “I knew you would do that and exactly when and how and already factored it in” plot magic, relieving writers of having to show even very smart characters needing to take a little time to figure things out or showing them reacting and improvising.
“Genius” in superhero comics is basically just “magic, but with technobabble and borderline precognition.” Every comics genius is written like a mix between the omnidisciplinary scientists of the Silver Age and a successful version of the Mad Thinker (who was always undone because he couldn’t factor in everything people might randomly do, because, implicitly, no one can).
Norman Osborn, for instance, went from a raving maniac with enough enhanced intelligence that let him build Goblin gadgets and whip up bespoke anti-Spider-Man chemical compounds to being some kind of world-class biologist and chemist who makes vast, elaborate plans that only fail because he’s too bonkers to see them through properly.
Likewise, Hank McCoy started int he 60s as someone who could whip up an anti-Unus the Untouchable ray gun to a more sensible specialist in the study of mutations and genetics. One of the big shifts in his character came when Jim Shooter established (circa Avengers v.1 #164) that the Beast was that critical bit less talented at biochemistry than Hank Pym and less knowledgeable about technology than Tony Stark, which led to his hedonistic, wisecracking personality. (Steve Engelhart had written a confident, brilliant Beast, but Shooter was trying out his “hero with an inferiority complex” idea that later ended up defining Hank Pym.)
But then, sometime in the late 90s or early 2000s, the Beast becomes a loquacious biology specialist who mucked up his initial experiments with controlled and induced mutation — hence the blue fur transformation — to a guy who works with just about any field of science or technology and easily navigates cross-dimensional weapons technology and could have developed significant understandings of magic if he’d just turned his mind to it.
A character with that kind of effective agency fits better into the “villain” role in the superhero comics genre. But the root of it is in comics writers thinking that intelligence eliminates the need for cognitive effort or even the time needed for basic knowledge acquisition.
Beast’s original sin has been cited by others as leaving Threnody with Mr. Sinister, explicitly deciding that a young mutant with mental health issues should be in the care of an amoral supervillain.
I don’t have an attachment to Hank McCoy as a character- I didn’t read his Avengers appearances until decades after they were published, still haven’t read any of New Defenders, never really liked O5 X-Factor or ‘90s X-Men- and I have no problem with his descent into villainy. It provides some balance to all the X-Men villains who have had face turns, at least. I agree with Loz that the execution has been a bit wonky.
RIP Sal Buscema. His grounded art kept Gerber’s Defenders from flying off the rails, and Hulk 300 is one of the best issues of the series because of his art.
I feel that there was a Scarlet Witch joke that could have been made here.
Wait, aren’t these usually Housekeeping?
I was really hoping we’d finally see long-awaited capsule reviews for New Teen Titans v.2 #24-25 and #34; Doom Patrol v.1 #115-116; and The Boys #23-29.
Best week of Brevoort’s tenure.
I fear that the X-books are doomed though, as not one made the Top 500 comics for the week. That has never happened in the history of comics.
Time for desperate measures. Bring on the Chuck Austen revival run.
Marvel is making up for this in April with three issues of Uncanny X-Men (bimonthly and an annual). Marvel never lets the fans down.
“I fear that the X-books are doomed”
I don’t fear that. I would *love* to see that! I would love for someone in charge to finally say, “Alright, look, this whole X-Men-as-an-entire-line-of-books isn’t really working anymore.” and roll it all the way back to X-Men-as-a-series. One book only. Six to eight main cast members, tops. I might actually read X-Men again.
It’ll never happen, obviously. The only doom in the X-Men’s foreseeable future is the upcoming Avengers: Doomsday film.
@Chris V.: Presumably someone at the X-book factory will have cleared the blockage by April, allowing all the backed-up issues to cascade messily onto the conveyor belt.
@Moo
Even in the No-Fox-Allowed/Terrigen period, the X-books never fell below five/month, no? (Three X-Men, two Wolverine)
Wonder how shops in the states were effected this week by the storms.Being not all that far from Diamond HQ, I know most everything was shut down Monday and parts of Tuesday. Not sure how the distribution system works these days with the other vendors and early ship dates, etc.
@SanityOrMadness – If you say so. I wasn’t reading anything anyway so I wasn’t keeping track.
Like I said, it’s never going to happen (a one-book X-Men franchise), but I can dream.
Mark-As far as I know, nothing was delayed this week. It’s just a fifth week of the month and the “Shadows of Tomorrow” relaunch is just kicking off, so Marvel scheduling being what it is there were six X-books last week and no X-books this week. Ours is not to question why, Marvel knows best.
Unless you mean how individual stores were affected.
About a month ago, there was a week with no DC books. This week, no X-books. I remember the days of fifth week events, now we have fifth week publishing shrugs.
@Chirs V, Mike Loughlin- The amazing thing is that this ISN’T a fifth week. It’s only the fourth week in January.
Huh. So it is. It’s been a long month…
I saw the new Iron Man #1 came out this week. Maybe Marvel was concerned about another IM series getting cancelled after ten issues.
Are you saying that Marvel Previews #53 doesn’t count as an X-book?
I think it’s a Superman title.
I meant individual stores. I talked to (friend of the pod) Joe Sposto and he said their store got their stuff over the weekend before the storm hit.
I haven’t been a Wednesday buyer in years and years, and 20+ years since I worked in a store, so the logistics of the modern comics shipping business are not my forte.
Do we the sales for Krakow when in decline and just before the editorial decision to bring the era to a close? I’m interested how they compare for the previous ten years, and also to now.
Basically, did they trade in low but steady sales (and fan acclaim) for this car crash?
I’m ignoring the narrative point that Hickman had a beginning middle and end planned. That ship sailed!
P.s. the concept of Austen as a high watermark to return to both terrifies and strangely thrills me. In retrospect the camp melodrama was actually a contrast to the other more serious books. Still utterly trashy, but memorable all for it
@Evilgus- In June 2023, the month before the last Hellfire Gala, X-Men 23 came in 9th, immortal X-Men came in 19th, Wolverine came in 32nd, X-Men Red came in 40th and X-Force came in 62nd. In May 2023, X-Men 22 came in 11tth, Immortal X-Men came in 15th, Wolverine came in 25th, X-Men Red came in 33rd and X-Force came in 57th. (Don’t ask how badly the Betsy Braddock: Captain Britain series did.)
It does seem like the top titles were selling better under Krakoa than under Brevoort’s reign.
(Although it’s interesting that even under Krakoa, Marvel had trouble making an X-Force title sell well.)
To be fair, they had a lot less competition also. It seemed like DC was having a hard time selling anything except Batman titles before “All In” and “Absolute”.
The current top X-books might be selling at the same level as the doldrums of Krakoa had DC not figured out how to attract fans again.
Well I got the latest Epic volume this week (Lifedeath), so there’s that. It was the most expensive one yet.
I was surprised that my comic shop had Uncanny and Storm (along with Endgame #2 and others). This was a week before they were supposed to come out according to League of Comic Geeks. So I’m wondering if things got jumbled, at least in the states.
As mentioned above, the ‘mutants suck, Inhumans rule’ era had five ongoing x-titles. The first phase of Krakoa had six ongoings (well, five + the Fallen Angels disaster).
Brevoort’s From the Ashes also had six ongoings… for team books alone.
Unlimited has a reading guide on Wonder Man at the moment. It includes the issue where it’s implied that Beast attended a three day long orgy. Beast was such a happy, fun character back then, strongly moral, maybe the most human of the Avengers (ironically). Now we have this bumbling shell of a man and/or a psychopath. Where is the heart?
Scott> I was surprised that my comic shop had Uncanny and Storm (along with Endgame #2 and others). This was a week before they were supposed to come out according to League of Comic Geeks. So I’m wondering if things got jumbled, at least in the states.
Nah, the post-Diamond distributors tend to ship early. Shops are MEANT to keep them in the back room and not sell them till the appropriate Wednesday, but….
Three days sounds like a long time for an orgy, not that I have a frame of reference.
It does, I guess Beast has superhuman stamina, and the 4 girls worked in shifts.
Maybe it was combined with San Diego Comic-Con.
The real reason they call him “Beast.”
I’m pretty sure they retconned the “happy, bouncy” Beast of the Avengers era as “secretly hiding his pain at being a furry freak and overcompensating with humor” or something. As opposed to him just… y’know, enjoying it.
I still miss the New Defenders era Beast. He was a lot of fun. Of course that led him into X-Factor… and the whole turned human/stronger-but-losing intelligence/turned furry again cycle.
When Beast was a member of the New Defenders he was interested in the Church of the Sub-Genius. Now, the Beast is far too serious to ever reference something like JR “Bob” Dobbs. Considering his life trajectory from the time of joining X-Factor, being involved with the depressing affairs of mutants is very bad for Hank McCoy. Better to have left it to those already too badly damaged like Scott, Jean, and Xavier. It’s far too late for the orgy-loving, “Slack” Beast of the New Defenders day.
In ye olden days of shops, breaking street date was a big NoNo.if diamond caught you, IIRC, they could not ship your books ahead of time so might or might not get them on Wednesday, they also employed secret shoppers to try and catch stores they thought might be in violation. And they either had or were planning on having a narc line where you could rat out a store that was doing it.
Off topic, but Rest in Peace Sal Buscema.
@wwk5d- That’s not completely off topic- he did do New Mutants for a year, after all. He did the issues which introduced Magma, Selene, and the Hellions.
And Marvel Team-Up 82-85 by Claremont, which established the Silver Samurai / Viper pairing.
Apropos of nothing, but I was glancing through some Krakoa-era Wolverine and X-Force last night, and… man. Do you think at any point, some editor was tempted to just say, “No. I’m sorry, but no. We CAN’T do this. There are morally ambiguous characters, there are characters who might realistically slip down the moral slope into full-on True Evil. Hank McCoy is not one of them. This character, who was frequently the moral center of whatever team he was on, simply would not do these things, no matter what.”
Fans wouldn’t shut up about it for a decade plus when Hal Jordan went genocidal, but at least he had the excuse of his city being destroyed while he was gone. And as far as rehabilitation efforts, “possessed by yellow fear monster” definitely ranks higher on the absolution scale than “uh, we just downloaded a pre-evil version from the past.”
“Rest in Peace Sal Buscema.”
Damnit. That one hits right in the childhood. I was a Hulk nut while the TV series was running and Sal was the regular artist on Incredible Hulk at the time.
@Drew I really think it was supposed to be Dark Beast in disguise as a “shocking” twist and readers all guessed it way too soon (took it for granted, really) so they pivoted to it being the real Hank after all.
Sal Buscema was great. He went unrecognized for a while because he was compared to his brother John and (more often) because he spent a lot of years being stretched thin because he was fast, dependable, and a lucid storyteller.
ut he had a distinctive and effective storytelling style. In particular, he provided some great, intense “facial acting” in his art for those mid-1990s Spider-Man stories he collaborated on with J.M. DeMatteis.
@Omar – Spot on. Sal could convey wonderfully effective expressions of shock, fear, horror, rage, etc, in characters. Granted, it was usually the same expression each time, but he made it work.
Yeah, his evolved style on Spectacular was probably one of the first artists whose work was instantly recognisable to me.
I like how Sal Buscema drew open mouths, just an empty white space. It exaggerated the expression nicely.
I really liked his time on New Mutants, brief as it was, for all the reasons listed above. He was able to render believable teenagers with recognizable facial expressions in dynamic situations.
Sienkiewicz was obviously quite a departure from Buscema’s down-to-earth style, but the comparison shows that both approaches had their strengths.
@Drew, yezhe- By the time Percy’s X-Force run started, Hank hadn’t been the morally upstanding Beast in a long time. The darkening of Hank’s character started in Endangered Species in 2007. Hank offers his services to villains like MODOK, Sinister and the Sugar Man if they will help him reverse the Decimation.After being rebuffed, he eventually agrees to work with the Dark Beast, who he takes to the Guthries’ home. Hank turns against the Dark Beast when he tries to use the Guthries as guinea pigs. Later on., during Secret Invasion, at Cyclops’
urging. he agrees to use the Legacy Virus against the Skrulls. Still later, in Ellis’s Astonishing X-Men, fearing of an invasion from an alternate Earth, Beast and Brand use a space laser to kill everything within a 10-mile radius of the originating point on that alternate Earth.
This should be taken as a sign how far Beast had fallen. Back in New Defenders. ,he objected to Moondragon merging Professor Power’s mind with his insane son’s to stop Power. Now, he was willing to kill everything within a 10-mile radius, and maybe even kill everyone on that alternate Earth.
What caused writers to suddenly darken Hank’s character? First. there was the Dark Beast, who was introduced in the 1994 as an evil alternate version of Hank. Then in the 2004 Here Comes Tomorrow storyline by Morrison, the villain was Beast, who became possessed by Sublime after taking the drug Kick. Then, during Astonishing X-Men, Whedon had Beast start dating Abigail Brand, who was incredible ruthless. Omar has also suggested that there’s a tendency in comics to portray geniuses as villains. That’s why Martin Stein got retconned into being secretly behind Ronnie’s transformation into Firestorm despite how little sense it made. (Stein had never been portrayed as that kind of Manipulative Bastard. Plus, in the original depictions of Firestorm’s origins, there’s no way Stein could have arranged for Ronnie to be at the reactor if Stein didn’t have superpowers.)
When Bendis took over X-Men, Hank’s darker character traits were stressed. Hank endangered the entire timeline just to teach Scott a lesson by bringing the Original Five to the present. Meanwhile, over in New Avengers. which was written by Hickman, Hank became a member of the Illuminati and engaged in all sorts of questionable behavior to stop the Incursions. Even Young Hank showed a dark side- Young Hank engaged in black magic.
Characters repeatedly stressed what a dark path Hank was going down. The Watcher showed up just to tell Hank how disgusted he was at Hank. In Uncanny X-Men 600, the X-Men hold an intervention for Hank and tell him he’s turning into Dark Beast.
But Hank didn’t learn anything, since he collaborated with fascists during Secret Empire.
Percy’s and White’s intentions in creating the Beast storyline during the Krakoan Era were to bring an end to Hank’s continued darkening by having him become a Full Villain, killing him off and replacing him with a clone whose memories ended before the writers darkened his character. Unfortunately, Percy took forever to bring the Beast storyline to a close. And by the time he was ready to finish it, Brevoort was taking over as X-editor. Brevoort thought that an evil Beast would make a great foe for the X-Men, and thought killing Hank off and replacing him with a younger clone was a copout, so he had Percy leave room for Evil Beast to survive. And that’s how we got to where we are now.
The irony is that one of the inspirations for the Beast’s darker portrayal was the Dark Beast and now the Dark Beast has been made redundant.
If the editors wanted to stop the villainization of Hank McCoy. they should have done something over a decade ago.
I think it’s just a tendency to darken superheroes since the 21st century started. Instead of Watchmen being a warning about what superheroes could have become in the real-world, comic publishers (maybe especially Marvel) decided to show that superheroes operated above the law and were not to be trusted.
Hank McCoy may have ended up an extreme case, but then again, that may be because Percy got his hands on Beast, and Percy doesn’t understand subtlety and sees everything in black and white (Moira with shades of grey? What’s that? Nah. She’s a psychopath). Besides which, as stated above, the point seems to be to have been to revert Beast back to his old self.
I believe this was the beginning of the downward trend for “mainstream” comic book sales. “Civil War” was probably the most damaging moment in Marvel history, as it seemed like from that point for two decades the superheroes spent more time fighting against each other than they did fighting supervillains. I don’t see the typical superhero fan being interested in seeing this (something like Watchmen every so often is fine as an alternate vision rather than the stories in every issue of every superhero book), as they want to see Good Guys beating up Bad Guys.
As someone who wrote academically on the topic, I’d definitely it starts in the 80s with not just Dark Knightnand Watchmen, but also Miracleman and the rise of Wolverine and Punisher as anti-heroes. Maybe some of the 2000 AD stuff too and some of the independent critical favorites like American Flagg. And then in the 90s, you get actual villains being given solo books like Venom, Lobo and others.
I think it’s pretty natural to look at a genius superhero and think, “What if he/she knows something that the other characters don’t?” I don’t mean scientifically speaking. I mean behind-the-scenes stuff. It may have been that line of thinking that led Morrison to come up with the idea that the Chief had been a mad bastard all along back when he was on Doom Patrol.
Also, genius and villainy seem to go together like chocolate and peanut butter. Think of how many times you’ve heard or read the phrase “evil genius” somewhere. You never hear “good genius” much (or at all, really).
Also, making the hero less clever and less knowledgeable than the villain is a very easy way to make the hero the underdog. Writing a smart hero means either writing even smarter villains.
Part of the issue is that superhero comics writers always go to the extreme. No one is “just” brilliant in a specific area, such as engineering or biology; they’re always a master of all fantastical sciences AND they can predict the behavior of other people to the nanosecond AND they’re foresighted enough to prepare for virtually every eventuality.
This was really blatant in the Silver Age, when we saw things like Donald Blake, MD, building sapient robots in his spare time. But it’s present in comics well after that.
Honestly, the 90s and beyond comic-book geniuses are arguably even less interesting than the 1960s “build whatever bespoke thingus” geniuses. These days, comic-book genius characters fall into tedious “I knew you would do that and exactly when and how and already factored it in” plot magic, relieving writers of having to show even very smart characters needing to take a little time to figure things out or showing them reacting and improvising.
“Genius” in superhero comics is basically just “magic, but with technobabble and borderline precognition.” Every comics genius is written like a mix between the omnidisciplinary scientists of the Silver Age and a successful version of the Mad Thinker (who was always undone because he couldn’t factor in everything people might randomly do, because, implicitly, no one can).
Norman Osborn, for instance, went from a raving maniac with enough enhanced intelligence that let him build Goblin gadgets and whip up bespoke anti-Spider-Man chemical compounds to being some kind of world-class biologist and chemist who makes vast, elaborate plans that only fail because he’s too bonkers to see them through properly.
Likewise, Hank McCoy started int he 60s as someone who could whip up an anti-Unus the Untouchable ray gun to a more sensible specialist in the study of mutations and genetics. One of the big shifts in his character came when Jim Shooter established (circa Avengers v.1 #164) that the Beast was that critical bit less talented at biochemistry than Hank Pym and less knowledgeable about technology than Tony Stark, which led to his hedonistic, wisecracking personality. (Steve Engelhart had written a confident, brilliant Beast, but Shooter was trying out his “hero with an inferiority complex” idea that later ended up defining Hank Pym.)
But then, sometime in the late 90s or early 2000s, the Beast becomes a loquacious biology specialist who mucked up his initial experiments with controlled and induced mutation — hence the blue fur transformation — to a guy who works with just about any field of science or technology and easily navigates cross-dimensional weapons technology and could have developed significant understandings of magic if he’d just turned his mind to it.
A character with that kind of effective agency fits better into the “villain” role in the superhero comics genre. But the root of it is in comics writers thinking that intelligence eliminates the need for cognitive effort or even the time needed for basic knowledge acquisition.
I didn’t mind Beast going dark, I just didn’t like that it was done in a ‘what if all of Beast’s plans were dumb and X-Force were incompetent?’ story.
Beast’s original sin has been cited by others as leaving Threnody with Mr. Sinister, explicitly deciding that a young mutant with mental health issues should be in the care of an amoral supervillain.
I don’t have an attachment to Hank McCoy as a character- I didn’t read his Avengers appearances until decades after they were published, still haven’t read any of New Defenders, never really liked O5 X-Factor or ‘90s X-Men- and I have no problem with his descent into villainy. It provides some balance to all the X-Men villains who have had face turns, at least. I agree with Loz that the execution has been a bit wonky.
RIP Sal Buscema. His grounded art kept Gerber’s Defenders from flying off the rails, and Hulk 300 is one of the best issues of the series because of his art.