Beast (comics) - Publication History

Publication History

Stan Lee and Jack Kirby created the Beast. Stan Lee writes in the foreword to X-Men: The Ultimate Guide that he made Beast the most articulate, eloquent, and well-read of the X-Men to contrast with his brutish exterior. Further, the book opines that the Werner Roth-Roy Thomas team garnered admiration for their "appealing and sensitive characterizations of the original X-Men." Roth (under the alias Jay Gavin) had taken over for Kirby fully by issue #18 and Thomas was a new talent. Beast was given an individualized, colorful new costume with the rest of the X-Men by issue #39 in order to attract new readers. After Jim Steranko's tenure, which added "exciting art," Roth returned, working with Neal Adams who blended Kirby's style with "realism, idealized beauty, and epic grandeur," making The X-Men (later named Uncanny X-Men) series one of the most popular superhero comics by the late 1960s.

In Amazing Adventures #11, written by Gerry Conway in March 1972, the Beast underwent a radical change in appearance, mutating into the now familiar furry creature. The concept originated with Roy Thomas, an effort to make the character more visibly striking, and Beast also became more werewolf-like to capitalize on the success of Werewolf by Night. Steranko reasons, "he had to expand beyond simply using big words." Over the next decade he would appear on the roster of several teams in titles ranging from Avengers to Defenders to X-Factor. It wasn't until 1991, in X-Factor #70/X-Men #1, that the Beast finally returned to the X-Men. In Uncanny X-Men #390, 2001, the Beast cured the Legacy Virus and in X-Treme X-Men #3, 2001, the Beast experienced a further mutation into a feline being, first shown in the introduction to New X-Men (June, 2001), by Frank Quitely and Grant Morrison. As evidenced on the back cover of X-Treme X-Men Vol. 1, Chris Claremont, writer of that series in addition to both Uncanny X-Men (for sixteen consecutive years) and X-Factor, contributed much to the Beast's characterization. Citing Claremont as inspiration for his run on New X-Men, Morrison explains Beast as a "brilliant, witty bipolar scientist." Morrison continues, "I saw Henry McCoy as an incredibly clever, witty, cultured, well-traveled, experienced, well-read character so I brought out those parts of his personality which seemed to me to fit the profiles of the smartest and most worldly people I know - his sense of humor is dark and oblique. He's obviously quite clearly bipolar and swings between manic excitement and ghastly self-doubt. He has no dark secrets, however, and nothing to hide." Joss Whedon's Astonishing X-Men: Gifted story arc featured a "mutant cure" designed by Indian Benetech scientist Dr. Kavita Rao, and the prospect of "real" humanity arouses the interest of a heavily mutated Beast, who visits Rao only to discover that the drug is the product of illegal human experimentation on an unknown victim. The idea of a mutant cure, which had previously appeared in the 1992 animated series, was also the basis of the X-Men: The Last Stand movie plot and the series was even made into a motion comic. IGN called the arc focusing on Beast "best X-Men run in a decade" and lauded Whedon for flawless character dynamics. According to BusinessWeek, the Beast is listed as one of the top ten most intelligent fictional characters in American comics.