Wolverine killed Beast in Marvel's X-Men, but there's a twist

If you know the X-Men’s Beast from 1992 X-Men: The Animated Series or the X-Men movies, you can think of him as a bouncing blue scientist using three-syllable words where one-syllables would suffice. He’s the happy head of the classic X-Men cast.

You are not wrong; This version of Henry McCoy is also very common in Marvel Comics. But in the Krakoan era, the pressure and power of having assumed responsibility for a mutant nation’s “CIA” drove Hank McCoy’s pragmatism and intelligence to a sociopathic war crime.

On the pages of X factor And wolverine — both written by Benjamin Percy since 2020 — he’s tortured, framed, and lobotomized in the name of “mutant safety.” He has created bioweapons, tricked his agents into killing innocents, and compounded a teammate’s addiction so she would be less likely to find out about his crimes. Lately he finally went too far and got caught. Percy’s twinned X-Men books speed toward a meaty (as if in spilled guts) confrontation between Wolverine and Beast, and it’s going to be delicious when this blue bastard gets what’s coming.

What else is happening on the pages of our favorite comics? We’ll tell you. Welcome to Monday Funnies, Polygon’s weekly list of books our comics editor has enjoyed over the past week. It’s part society pages about the lives of superheroes, part recommended reading, and part look at this cool art. There may be some spoilers. There may not be enough context. But there will be great comics. (And if you missed the last issue, read this.)

Wolverine stabs Beast in the neck and sternum and, covered in blood, watches him bleed to death in Wolverine #30 (2023).

As to be expected for a Wolverine comic, this image is gory – but trust me, this guy deserves it.

Understanding of Beast’s malevolent potential dates back to the mid-1990s, when writer Scott Lobdell and artist Roger Cruz envisioned an alternate universe called Henry McCoy (later known as “Dark Beast”) that transcended all ethical boundaries in had driven scientists mad.

Writers like Brian Michael Bendis have expressed this by giving Hank a god complex in which he makes unilateral decisions like “I should bring the X-Men’s younger selves forward in time to remind the present ones of their ideals and dreams, I will definitely be able to prevent something bad from happening as a result.”

But it’s one thing to create the time-displaced young X-Men and another to murder Wolverine, tinker with his resurrection to come back as a mindless, docile monster from an assassin and the people responsible for the mutant resurrection saying that was all Logan’s idea for a top-secret mission anyway. Logan got better and finally got his claws into Hank this week, but with none of the X-Men left dead, this promises to be just the beginning of the battle between a nearly unbeatable weapon and a nearly unbeatable strategist.

An old woman with a knife-tipped staff travels through a wild landscape with a giant cob of cheese and corn conversing, a 100-foot-tall skeleton sitting atop the landscape, and the moon beating a pair of sunglasses from the sun Billion Geniuses #7 (2023).

Eight billion ghoststhe story of what happens when every single person in the world is granted a genius wish at the same time – told in segments of the first eight minutes, the first eight hours, the first eight days, etc. – its story ends next month with an oversized edition, covering the first eight centuries after the world went crazy. Seeing the bizarre creativity of Charles Soule and Ryan Browne on this series has been an absolutely wild ride, and however they bring it home, I’ll enjoy it.

I find myself really fascinated by the DC Comics Lazarus Planet anthologies – even if I don’t usually enjoy every story in them. I like this strategy of using at least part of each book for a short story that introduces a brand new hero who is then confirmed to have a starring role in a new book.

Another thing I like: This character design!! Xanthe is the new non-binary hero at the heart of spirit world, a miniseries revival of an obscure Jack Kirby title. Award-winning writer Alyssa Wong collaborates with artist Haining on a story about Xanthe and John Constantine saving Batgirl Cassandra Cain from hopping vampires. spirit world will begin in May in honor of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders Month.