Warning: contains spoilers for X-Force #48!After months of teasing and preparation, X-Men has finally replaced one of the team’s five founding members, introducing a new hero to take their place. The major change to Marvel lore comes as the franchise’s Fall of X era depicts the final battle of mutantkind vs AI life, but this being the X-Men, there’s still time for a little internecine warfare before they face extinction.
In X-Force #48, X-Force’s base is attacked by Henry ‘Hank’ McCoy, aka the Beast. After being targeted for death by his former team, Beast has struck out on his own, and wants a suit of telefloronic armor created by the mutant inventor Forge. Beast downs the team with custom weapons then takes his leave, leading the mutant genius Sage to propose a radical new approach to hunting him down – “The best way to stop Beast… is Beast.”
It turns out that Sage has one of the Beast clones that the original created to serve his dark ‘Weapons of X’ militia, and the ability to download Hank McCoy’s old memories, back before he committed his most despicable acts. While Wolverine argues against creating a second Beast, the team go ahead, leading to a new heroic Beast joining X-Force – one who can’t believe what his other self has done.
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X-Force Replaces the X-Men’s Original Beast with a New Clone
The New Beast Has None of the Original’s Modern Memories
Throughout this volume of X-Force, Beast has undergone a shocking corruption. Tasked with protecting the mutant island of Krakoa, Beast couldn’t handle the power he’d been given, and descended into human rights abuses, shocking experimentation on captive mutants, and eventually cloning brain-damaged versions of Wolverine to carry out assassinations. Unlike usual superhero stories, however, Beast isn’t under mind control or carrying out a genius double-bluff – he’s always been arrogant and assured of his own righteousness, and now those flaws have turned him into a monster.
The new Beast is created using old imprints of Beast’s personality, taking him right back to around 1985’s New Defenders #142. Cutting away 40 years of Marvel canon is extreme enough, but the new Beast also finds out everything his other self has done and sets out to hunt him down. While he may be based on the Beast fans knew 40 years ago, this Hank is already a different character, now out of step with history and destined to struggle with the knowledge of what the original became. In future stories starring this Beast, the last four decades of X-Men stories will have happened to somebody else.
The Original Beast Has to Die – & Wolverine Won’t Stop Until He Kills Him
X-Men’s Founding Hero Has Been Replaced, and Now He’s Got to Go
There’s no way to redeem the original Beast, who has done appalling things entirely of his own free will, and Marvel has made that fact official by replacing him with a younger clone. While the new Beast may not be trusted by X-Force, he just officially took the original’s place within the wider X-Men franchise – Marvel’s mutant comics have a heroic Hank McCoy once again, and all that’s left to do is kill off the original (something Wolverine is set on doing as the book nears its finale with X-Force #50.)
While the new Beast has the personality and memories of a hero fans knew 40 years ago, the franchise has made it clear again and again that a clone is their own person, even if that’s only because they’re shaped differently by the way they’re treated. From Jean Grey’s evil mystic twin Madelyne Pryor to Cable’s nemesis Stryfe to Laura Kinney’s beloved sister Gabby, X-Men’s clones carry all the baggage of who they might have been, plus the unfolding drama of who they’ve become. It will be fascinating to see how the new Beast reckons with living in a world where his friends and allies on the X-Men see him as a villain, however the first step to winning back their trust is to help with X-Force’s final mission: kill Beast.
X-Force #48 is available from Marvel Comics now.
