50 Greatest Super Heroes In Comic Book History

46. Beast

(Write-up by Matt Conner, Bam Smack Pow Staff Writer)

A founding member of the X-Men, Hank McCoy was ostensibly the lowest-powered one. His mutant ability was that he had big hands and feet, and could jump around and swing from pipes and say, “Oh, my stars and garters!” a lot. And to this day, that remains his mutant power. Sure, he’s brave to rush into battle with Magneto when the worst he can do is shove his bare feet into his helmet, but if it had stopped there, he wouldn’t have seen any space on this 50 Greatest Heroes list.

Beast’s greatness comes from his intellect, his attitude, and his history of stupendously stupid choices. From an intelligence standpoint, he is often lumped in with Reed Richards and Tony Stark as one of Marvel’s brain trust, and this earned him the Mutant Delegate seat at Jonathan Hickman’s secret Illuminati table. When the X-Men have major battles, Beast’s role is usually that of tech support, cobbling together machines like that power suppression headband to take out the Dark Phoenix. Yes, the headband melted in two panels, and Dark Phoenix then wiped out the team and flew off to eat a planet, but it was still a decent idea, and he gets some credit. Readers who follow Hank McCoy get to feel good about liking school, about getting good grades, about occasionally quoting Shakespeare to a crowd that tilts their heads in response. Beast is telling kids to stay in school and to stop bullying the smart ones. That’s great.

His attitude is also something that marks him. Despite significant tragedies — like disfiguring transformations and the dogged inability to get Jean Grey to even notice him — he still makes the kind of one-liners that appeal to Spider-Man fans. During his time on the Avengers, he was best friends with Wonder Man and often instigated buddy-comedy adventures in the margins of bigger cosmic fights. He even spent quality time on the silly Californian Champions team. He’s encouraging readers to look at the bright side, and that’s sorely needed when most books are about violence and loss.

But his greatest heroic quality is his ability to keep going despite a pathological self-destruct button. In Amazing Adventures 11, he was working for a chemical company and distilled the chemical cause of mutation. When he overheard his bigot boss making plans to fire him as a means of preventing more mutants on this planet, the super genius opted to drink his own formula to … keep it safe. And it turned him into that blue furry monster we later saw as Kelsey Grammer in the X-Men movies.

Decades later, his body started to break down, and he used a time machine to pull the original X-Men out of the 1960’s so his younger self could fix him, and in so doing, he pretty much broke all the Marvel Universe space-time continuum in some way that Bendis keeps trying to convince us is a big deal, even if the implications have yet to be described. That’s right, kids — don’t be afraid to drink your science fair project. And as long as you’re really serious, it’s okay to endanger the lives of everyone who has ever and will ever live! And in this, he shows us readers that heroism isn’t about avoiding mistakes. It’s about taking responsibility for the ones you’ve made and doing what you can to make them right again.

Next: No. 45: More unique than her name would suggest