#koalaguru

Yeah, I categorically have to agree, Beast was criminally wasted on Krakoa.

Like, even if you do take the view that his heel turn was done well (it wasn't), it was a logical place for his character to go (it wasn't), and that his villain arc was satisfying (it wasn't), it's still, objectively, the stupidest thing to do with him, in and out of universe, because Hank is actually fairly unique among X-Men characters in terms of how he can interact with the Krakoan status quo?

So, let's explore some of the stories that we could have gotten during the Krakoan era!

Now, in the interests of fairness, this thought experiment will have a few ground rules, most notably that it has to treat everything that came before it, up to 2018-2019, as hard canon, and it has to flow naturally from that point. We're also not going to radically alter the rest of the Krakoan story, in part because I hate the wankery of 'oh, everything would have been fine if this one character had been here,' and in part because Krakoa was designed to fail, so we're keeping those themes and intents intact.

Ah, but I hear you say! How can that be so when X-Force can't happen without Beast there?

Easily, I say! One, because X-Force doesn't actually do shit in the wider Krakoan story - it's, like, genuinely worthless as part of the wider narrative, there's a reason every recommended reading list for the era skips it - and two, because we can just put Dark Beast in charge of it instead, and the story doesn't change at all.

Why not? If Sinister can be on the Quiet Council, why can't Dark Beast get his shot at a position of authority? He's still alive, so we don't have to worry about justifying his resurrection under the no clones rule, and it would suit Sinister's wider story beats to have an ally who owes him for saving his life in such a useful position.

But yeah, this legitimately doesn't change the story one bit. All you have to do is tweak a few bits of Jean Grey, Colossus, and Domino's dialogue, and nothing changes. So, X-Force is completely intact. You're welcome. Now, on with the show!

Option 1-A: Exile/The Nonconformist

One of the more interesting and maybe divisive choices I think we could go with for Hank - what if he just says no, I wouldn't want to be on your kooky culty ethnostate island? Or, alternatively, what if the Quiet Council string him along, get him to create their miracle drugs, and then exile him from the island because he's considered a rogue, unstable element?

It's within their character, especially Shaw, Mystique, Apocalypse and Sinister, to not want him around, and frankly, I don't think Jean, Charles, Kurt, or Ororo would really vouch for him, either. The X-Men have been established not to fully trust Hank, thanks to the time travel debacle, and he doesn't like them much, either, after they stabbed him in the back during Inhumans vs. X-Men and got him fired from Harvard, so it'd be very easy to more naturalistically pick up on the story beats from there with him just not being welcome on Krakoa or not wanting to be there.

It also fits with the wider course of his character, where Hank has repeatedly expressed unease at being an X-Man and left the team as a result, multiple times. Hell, this is where he's at with Charles and the X-Men as of 2018.

Not exactly champing at the bit, is he? He sounds tired, and over it.

This opens up a more realistic and, let's be real here, interesting dynamic than we had on Krakoa, where everyone is, by virtue of editorial dictate, now magically fine with one another to the point where they'll all live on the same island and also completely fine with establishing a new nationality for themselves.

We can argue about Krakoa's isolationism, capitalism, human policies, etc, but the fact remains, everyone was made a monolith and they all moved in together, and it was kinda lame if you stopped and thought about it. They did it because the X-office wanted all their eggs in one basket so they could hand them out to their writers and not have to share, not because it was a natural move for a lot of these characters.

As you intimated, it especially doesn't really make sense for Hank to do this - he's been an Avenger for almost as long as he's been an X-Man, a lot of his best friends are on that team, and his friendships with the X-Men are rocky at best, textually speaking. His very human and pro-mutant parents are still in Illinois, and still alive, as of 2018.

I also think it's an interesting move from the Krakoan side - you establish early on that there's some real double standard bullshit going on, just like you do with Sabretooth, but EXACTLY as with Sabretooth, it's against an 'acceptable' target.

It's also a good springboard from which to spur Hank into action - maybe this is his penance for his actions, exile from paradise, the punishment he kept saying he was ready to accept but that no-one seemed willing to dole out. Maybe this pushes him to clean up his act. Maybe this is what Eva Bell was talking about, when she talked about the Trial of Hank McCoy - the trial that determines that he's unfit to be Krakoan. This is really interesting emotional ground for him, too, to be ostracised again - does it hurt as much, does he rave, does he go ballistic, does he quietly accept it and cut ties?

Where does he go from here? I don't quite know! Maybe Jed MacKay gets to use him for his new Avengers team, come 2023, and he gets to join the fight against Orchis as part of Fall of X. Maybe we get a Defenders reunion, with Gargoyle, Moondragon, and a few new members. Maybe we get a Beast and Wonder Man team up comic! Hell, get him to join the Fantastic Four or Spider-Man as a supporting character - Hank has so many connections, you can literally use him anywhere.

Option 1-B: X-Club.

An offshoot of the above - what if Hank appears to be exiled/a non-conformist, but he's actually on a secret mission for Xavier? More specifically, what if he's been given the directive that he SHOULD have been given from the start - to find a way to oust Sinister from Krakoa, permanently.

Think about it. Hank is objectively smarter than Sinister, he just doesn't obsessively focus on genetics. He is the single smartest X-Man. If anyone can rebuild, steal, or substitute Sinister's genetic database, the one bit of collateral keeping every X-Man from obliterating him on the spot, it's him.

Enter X-Club volume 2.

Beast, Kavita Rao, Doctor Nemesis - throw in every scientist you've got. Their one mission: get their hands on Sinister's database. I'm thinking a five issue miniseries, short, sweet, loaded with science and sass. In the end, they fail, because the rest of Krakoa has to unfold, but guess what? At least they tried! At least the Quiet Council is trying! Maybe they get away with a small victory, maybe a portion of the database, maybe they only put a stop to one of Sinister's schemes (which would make it intertwine with Hellions nicely), but at least they tried.

You also get to play with some of the more interesting aspects of being an undercover operative - namely, the emotional toll of lying to your friends and family about what you've been up to. Imagine the charge of Hank having to shit-talk Krakoa, knowing that Bobby and Warren and Jean are all going to hear it, and then he has to go and fight for it, and he can't say a word about it? There's pathos and tragedy in there!

Option 2: Temporal Guardian

The X-Men cannot escape from crossing fate - uh, I mean, temporal drama and bullshit. Krakoa especially was rife with it, thanks to shit like Sins of Sinister and Moira X, so, why not let's actually interact with it, using one of the characters who has both the knowledge and the power to interact with time on a higher level?

Hank McCoy canonically had: 1) intricate knowledge of temporal physics, 2) temporal senses that made him mentally immune to changes in the timeline, and 3) the ability to move, completely independently, through time using magic.

The guy's just a fucking Time Lord at that point.

So, let's let him Time Lord! Imagine a circuit between him, Rachel Summers and Tempus - Sins of Sinister would be over like that. You're worried about the timeline where mutants always win or always lose? Just use the mutants at your disposal to metagame your way to the timeline you want! You literally have the tools, you just won't use them!

This is the most 'comic booky' of the options, but I honestly think this could have been fun as a gimmick for a book, battling across centuries for the fate of mutantkind, taking on all comers - hell, maybe you could even use Orbis Stellaris for something instead of having him just sit around in his dumb orb, and he decides to try and engineer a win using temporal warfare!

It'd be neat, is all I'm saying.

Option 3: The School

Remember how Krakoa didn't have a school?

You know? The island nation, didn't have an actual place where you'd go and learn shit? The thing we had when we were a superhero team, but the instant we decide we want infrastructure and a nation and a full on population, we just don't want it?

Think I found your dude.

It always struck me that the move to teacher made more sense for some X-Men than others, but for Hank, it really was the most natural fit in the world. Highly academic, empathetic, good with kids, open minded, versatile - he's perfect to lead a school. And, now that you've divorced the school from the X-Men, you avoid the issue you had when Hank took over the school during Here Comes Tomorrow, where the pressure destroyed him - he doesn't have to worry about the fate of mutantkind, he's literally just a teacher now.

But, 'just' a teacher? Of mutants? Ha!

This would be a really interesting coming of age/community book, I think, maybe more slice-of-lifey and akin to Wolverine & the X-Men volume 1 in content, though maybe not as whacky in tone. Academy X students, nascent mutants, people who just want to pick up a community college class, people who never got a formal education, hell, characters who find they need qualifications in things that they never got - you could literally throw everyone in here, and Hank can bounce off them all.

This is maybe the 'safest' place for Hank, the most obvious and 'boring,' but I think a good writer who's interested in the mutant metaphor and the generational aspect of it, as well as the passing vs. non-passing mutant dichotomy, would have a lot of material to dive into - your ideas, of Hank grappling with his role as role model to these kids, of working on his complicated feelings regarding his mutation, would slot in well here, I think.

A story where Hank arrives to teach a class in his human form, much to the shock, worry, and disturbance of all of his students, and the ramifications of such a choice, would be really interesting, and a good opportunity to comment on the Krakoan tendency towards disposable bodies and the cheapness of death, too.

That being said, I do think it's worth noting that Bendis' choices with Hank and the subsequent story flow seem to indicate that Hank's dysmorphia and dysphoria were associated primarily with his feline form, since he'd come to terms with his classic form and seemed more comfortable in his modern form immediately.

The switch from full kevlar vest, bandolier, pants and body coverings to the shorts says it all, doesn't it? One of these bodies is acceptable to display. The other is not. But, even if Bendis took away the feline mutation in favour of a design that appealed more to nostalgia, that doesn't mean we can't use this book to unpick that idea, and talk about Hank's feelings on that and why one is okay while the other isn't. There were aspects of this in New Mutants, and this would be a good way to handle it from yet another perspective!

Option 4: Reunion and Reconciliation

So, it's pretty fair to say that the O5 have drifted apart.

So.

Let's DO something with that, shall we?

O5 reunion book. Let's hash it all out. Every petty grievance, every massive failure, every way they've hurt one another, not been there for one another, let's DO IT. Let's hear Hank tear Scott a new one for not saving him from Osborn until the time was right. Let's hear Scott tear Hank a new one for breaking the space-time continuum just to try and hurt him. Let's hear Warren tear Jean a new one for the shitty way she treated him when they were time displaced. Let's do EVERY. SINGLE. ONE. Let's put it all to rest.

Maybe this could only sustain a big giant size issue, but fuck it, it's a better use of page space than that Original X-Men one-shot that ended up being nothing but an advert for yet another Wolverine book! And it would be high key dramatic as fuck. Let's do that thing that often makes for the single best episodes of a TV show or movie - people in a room, around a table, TALKING at one another. There is so much history there, and you wouldn't know it by looking at Krakoa as it is! Scott, Warren and Bobby never even speak Hank's name, and god knows that Warren got shit fuck bugger nothing to do for most of the era once X-Corp died, so let's DO something, like, my god. These people are meant to be family - let's treat them like one.

And hell, while we're at it? Let's settle what happened with Abigail once and for all, too! Are they together? Are they not? What's the story, morning glory? I hate existing in this nowhere space where we don't know shit about fuck!

Option 5: X-Forces Beyond Our Control

All right, so, I've been outlining all of the above, and the assumption has always been that X-Force just ends the way it does in 616, though it's probably a little less homoerotic, Dark Beast probably just bites it at Logan's hands and it's all as uncritical as Percy's normal work.

Well, what if X-Force were good, actually?

What if we leverage some old history?

Bring Beast in as a supporting cast member for X-Force once Dark Beast, their Director, goes rogue.

Let's explore and unpack Sage and Hank's relationship - let's look at the way that Xavier wronged them both, made them both child soldiers, brought their genius to bear, left them emotionally unprepared for the future they faced.

Let's unpack Hank's lingering resentment over the choice that Sage made for him, that saved his life but 'trapped' him in the feline form for years.

Let's unpack Sage's jealousy and confusion over Hank being Charles' favourite, let's take the old man to task, let's see where this goes.

Hell, while we're at it, let's even do something with Colossus, and dive into Hank's guilt over Piotr's taking of the Legacy Virus cure so many years ago. Does Piotr even realise Hank felt that way, realise that he feels he probably killed Piotr? Does he forgive him? Does Hank forgive himself?

And then we lock in. Beast vs. Dark Beast. The final confrontation. It's been brewing since 1996, and it's about time we settled it.

So, those are my thoughts on what Beast COULD have been up to Krakoa, instead of being stuck in a 100 issue long diatribe about how 'Kissinger Was Bad, Mmkay?' by a sub-par writer. I also think that while you could choose one of these options, it's not out of the question to do ALL of them, if you really wanted to maximise your Beast per year values. They're not exactly mutually exclusive, if you think about it!

The Fox movies. Replete with inaccuracies as they are, it feels almost churlish to rag on them for making Hank notably older than everyone else in his generation because there is just so much wrong with those films, but, as the entry point into the franchise for a whole generation of fans, and having created a whole sub-genre of X-Men fandom that occasionally touches the comics but otherwise stays hermetically sealed, it's created this persistent impression that Hank is Old.

Kelsey Grammer was born in 1955. That made him 34 years older than Shawn Ashmore, 27 years older than Anna Paquin, 18 years older than James Marsden, 13 years older than Hugh Jackman, 11 years older than Halle Berry, 9 years older than Famke Janssen - he's only 15 years younger than Patrick Stewart, and only 16 years younger than Ian McKellen.

That is a huge age gap, and it's not just the actual age gap, either, it's the kind of performance that Grammer gave, which is very much in tune with TAS Beast - he is not a very youthful and exuberant Hank McCoy. He feels older, distinguished, he wears a lot of suits, he's only in one real action scene, and even his costume is less revealing than almost any of his comic costumes.

No, I'm serious, it has an effect!

The version of Hank from the Marvels is played by Grammer 20 years after X3, and yet I think it's undeniable that he looked and felt younger in the movie made way later. Partly it's thanks to the CGI, but I also think the fact that he dresses in a pair of shorts and a lab coat plays into it, too. Young people wear less, old people wear more, generally speaking.

And that's not necessarily a problem, because Grammer's performance is excellent, and there are touches that make it feel right for this version of the character in X3, like the fact that he's notably fit but appears to have gone a little to seed, and the fact that he's straight up in government now. But. A popular performance is a performance that gets remembered, and codified.

Hoult being the only member of the actual O5 in First Class and being carried through those movies as an original X-Man, with characters like Scott and Jean being introduced in Apocalypse as very, very young teens, only exacerbated the problem, on top of being a version of the character that doesn't have much resemblance to Hank McCoy anyway.

There's a whole subsection of the X-Men fandom that only really interacts with the series through those movies and writes about those movies - check AO3 sometime, and see how much is still being produced for the XMCU fandom, even though the main series is over and has been for years at this point. For them, Hank is only ever one way - Old. And even when he wasn't old, he was stodgy.

Which leads us to the next problem - the fact that Hank, often, will act much older than he is. It's glaringly obvious especially when you look at 60s Hank, who's already contending with the fact that young people in the 60s looked like they were 40 despite being 16; on top of that handicap, he's canonically the oldest of the O5 (by a whopping whole year, wow, much age gap), but also the one who dresses most formally, and speaks the most formally, and looks the most adult, because of his mutation.

He is physically the largest because of his massive limbs, ergo, you mentally code him as Older. The things that he does to hide and blend in, the suits, the primping, the big words, the stuffiness, all code as Older. You can also really see it with how he changes from classic Hank to feline Hank.

Like, there is a passage of time here, but despite the gap of around 15 years publication time, in-universe, it's only meant to be a few years. Hank is maybe 29 in the first page, 33-ish in the page, but the process of mutating and needing to affect a more distinctly human and more controlled appearance, the trauma that piled on multiplicatively, the darker tone of the comic as they went on, Hank just became older, relatively speaking, and artificially so, in a way.

This ended up compounding with storylines like X-Force, where he was explicitly written as being out of shape, sedentary, more cynical, less funny, all of these character tics that you just instinctively associate with age. A similar sort of thing happened with Professor Xavier - he was written to be much, much closer to the O5 in age in the original 60s run, judging by certain contextual clues and character backstory, but as time went on, his baldness, his disability, his relationships with notably older, adult women, his authority, all contributed to him being aged up and up and up. It's subtle, and it happens over time, but it does happen.

And, as you've touched on, Hank just became much less a character of action as time went on.

Hank actually became much stronger over time, going from being able to lift just one ton to a full ten tons by his modern mutation, but even with that power upgrade, his character archetype has been firmly nudged over, from the original X-Men's Big Guy bruiser, into a full on genius/mad scientist.

That is now his defining trait, because comic book writers like to have an easy source of sci-fi problems and solutions to tie up their plots, and use of brawn is just not considered to be an appropriately Beast solution to problems anymore. See also the move towards showcasing characters with flashy powers like energy projection and psionics over raw super strength, which I think is why characters like Colossus have really suffered with staying relevant in the comics these last few decades.

Hell, it's gotten so bad that Hank's trademark visual action style has, by and large, fallen by the wayside. It used to be that Hank did this kind of sequence all the time:

He does still do it, very, very occasionally, but the last time I can really think of him doing it is during S.W.O.R.D volume 1, back in 2009. Which, again, has a very bright, upbeat, energetic Beast. This sequence communicates energy, vitality, youth, and even though Hank hasn't aged that much, the lack of use of his old visual signifiers means that he feels older - or, maybe it's more accurate that he feels less notably young. Either way, the effect is the same.

On the one hand, this overall ageing up doesn't bother me as much as a lot of other Beast related foibles - the fandom's refusal to shut the fuck up with their one war crimes joke, for one - and it is a thing that Hank often tries to consciously foster, so that he feels more trustworthy and less dangerous, but it removes him from his friends in a way that I hate, and it makes him less human and less fun and, honestly? It makes him less popular, more remote.

You only have to see how people conceptualise Beast in headcanon or X-Men '97 fandom posts to see how Beast being older knocks on to his relationships with people - he's not regarded as Jean and Scott's mutual best friend, he's regarded as essentially Charles' friend, as the mature one.

People don't conceptualise him as funny, as overtly romantic, as sexual, as goofy, as lovable, he's distinguished and controlled and sometimes even cold, and that's just. Not Hank. Not in his entirety, anyway, not fully. Hank is such a good character precisely because he swings so wildly all over the emotional spectrum, is all of these things and more, and yet it all still makes cohesive sense when you key in to his character. Removing his warmth, his immaturity, his humour, his youth, hurts that complexity.