Visit the original place where these letters of comment appeared ar the Avengers Message Board

See Ian's parody fan fiction from Baron Zemo's Lair at The Hooded Hood's Homepage of Doom

Go back to the Index

On the Beast's Character

Hank McCoy is one of the more complicated characters in the Marvel Universe. He is apparently easy to write, but in practise it seems difficult for writers to make him anything but one of two parodies of his true self. Too often he is either the wisecracking funny one or else the brilliant scientist underestimated because he seems to be the wisecracking funny one. But there's far more to the beast than that.

Like most mutants Hank's powers cut in, in his case quite gradually, during his puberty. The formerly bookish and shy character briefly became big man on campus because of his amazing athletic abilities. This probably went to his head and for a while he adopted a rather brash persona (the Beast of X-Men #1 who comes on so strong to Jean Grey and reads like an uncouth Ben Grimm). Shortly after joining Xavier's school, perhaps because of peer pressure - why would the rest of the X-Men be as impressed just because he's amazingly athletic? - Hank adopts an entirely different persona, this time of the eccentric intellectual. He uses long words to emphasise his intellect and call attention to himself in an entirely different way. He needs to feel secure as part of the team, so he chooses a role in the team which is easily defined - good ol' egghead Hank.

When the X-Men go their separate ways Hank goes to work for the Brand Corporation. Out on his own for the first time that old insecurity bites again. Hank's experiments with his powers transform him into the grey-and furry --later blue-and-furry - Beast we know today. The Brand Corp. to whom he had transferred the same kind of loyalty and dependence he once felt for the X-Men turn out to be baddies. Hank is shattered by his transformation and his betrayal and goes through an angst-filled period of self-doubt and self-loathing.

From this wounded character comes the bouncing bubbly Beast who is most associated with the Avengers. From his early improbable abilities to do instant disguises (as, for example, Edward G. Robinson) and his devil-may-care quips, here is a Beast who has once again moulded a persona to allow him to fit in. This time he's found a new way of being the class clown. Even more so than in the X-Men the Beast is hardly the powerhouse of his team. Unlike the X-Men, the Beast is not even the sole brilliant scientific intellect. Here he plays second fiddle to Tony Stark, to Hank Pym, to T'Challa, even sometimes to Don Blake. So he has to be someone else to "deserve" his palce with the team.

But strangely this persona works far better for Hank than any before. For one thing, women seem to find him attractive, and for the first time Hank seems to develop a sex life. His cavortings with girls during his time as an Avenger are very different from his low-key dating of Vera Cantor or his awkward fumblings with Patsy Walker. And like many young men who have just discovered their success with the opposite sex, hank finds it hard not to boast about it to his friends.

But Hank is still the genius who speaks a dozen languages and possesses half-a-dozen degrees, a chemist of note who feels slighted when nobody asks his opinion on the diagnostics of the newly-resurrected Wonder Man. His role chafes as his comrades take him at face value, judging him by the person he has chosen to portray himself to them as. And again like many people as they grow up he finds a way to blend together the best aspect of all the "people" he has been, becoming a more rounded person because of it.

This all comes to a head around Avengers #211, when Cap invokes his six-member limit and the Beast finally decides that it is time to move on. Hank no longer needs to define himself by his place in a team. The Beast has grown up. Subsequent appearances in the Defenders, and later in X-Factor, depict a more mature character who uses the various aspects of his character as the situation requires, and who can be tough, insightful, playful, or passionate in equal measure.

The Beast's character was still not set, of course. He spent some time back in his more human, hairless form during his early X-Factor days, and seemed for a while to have regressed to his egghead personality, probably because he found himself back in the team where he used to play that role. How many of us have met up with old school friends or college buddies and found ourselves regressing to the person our seldom-seen-these-days friends remember us as? I detect something of the same effect during Hank's recent appearance in Avengers #14, as he portrays himself as the manic Beast of the Michelnie-era team.

And so to the reason why writing Hank is so hard. Many writers tend to select the persona with which they are most comfortable and write the Beast as if that was all there was to him. Only the most insightful writers are able to give us the multi-layered Henry McCoy who is all of these characters at some time, occasionally in rapid succession.