thebettermccoy

[thebettermccoy]

Should be getting a AO3 invite in the next day or so...

I'm actually going to try my hand at writing some X-Men fanfiction that I let other people read!

[thebettermccoy]

Dr do you work for commission? Im tryna become my fur sona

"Darling, my price for giving you want *you* want is far out of your price range."

"But I'll gladly have you in my lab for free."

[thebettermccoy]

✌�� (I take that dare)

Fuck off <3

[thebettermccoy]

Send me ✌️ for my muse to say two words to yours. Just two words.

[thebettermccoy]

Do you have a Playlist that reminds you of Hank? Or Dark Beast.

Also, may I recommend

Devil in disguise by Marino.

I do not, at least not dircetly. Probably because 99% of the music I listen to does not reminisce of Henry or Hank to me. (It's actually really hard for me to understand the lyrics to a majority of songs. The number of songs I listen to and like and the percentage of those I actually understand all the words to is kinda sad. So, I mainly listen to the music for the vibes. For some reason, artists like P!nk and Crane Wives sing in a way that I can understand them. Thus, they are my favorite.)

Though sometimes to get in the headspace of replying as him, I'll listen to 'dark' music like Nine Inch Nails for the general vibe.

...Devil in Disguise is a good song! (And I understood it!) Thanks for sharing it with me.

Not that it particularly reminds me of McCoy, but Petty AF by LovelySlaughter is super good. Thought I'd share a song back.

[thebettermccoy]

"They just used him as a nod to the fact that he was no longer the 'darkest beast'. Insinuating that 616 Hank has surpassed 295 Henry in level of scientific/moral evils. No other reason. Ugh."

Oh man I just realized that. Now I'm just sad. That's horrible and sort of sad excuse on their part? I wonder if this also to put down those theories of Dark Beast replacing Hank (again) or that there was some sort of error in the resurrection protocol. Where Krakoa confused them as the same.

Honestly, I think x-men fans writes better than the official writers. If somehow retconed. Would love to see either theories or how they'll tackle that.

Do you have any theories? Would love to hear them if there's any.

You got it exactly right.

Do you have any theories?

Yes. You see, it will be revealed that Sinister kept Dark Beast alive in order to replicate whatever changes he had made to his brain over the years so that he could secretly inject 616 with a case of the evil.( Which is why he went from morally questionable to 'muwahahaha evil" so quickly.) Not only to fuck with Krakoa in general, but with 295 Henry because why not?

This will all be revealed when some seemingly innocent person is the current lackey of 295 head-in-the-jar Henry, who is trying to do (insert randomly evil thing here) while also trying to get a new body...which he is going to take from reboot 616 Hank.

...Did you ever watch stupid soap operas on daytime television as a kid? Let's lean into that and do some Days of Our Mutant Lives.

...Is it a serious theory? No, but it's funny and still somewhat better than some of the actual published material.

[thebettermccoy]

I had the doodling bug.

[thebettermccoy]

"Head in a glorified pickle jar."

Is so funny to me. Especially when he hates pickles. Have some pickled Mccoy. And what does sinister even need his head for anyway? Or how sinister acquired it in the first place.

Not much of a scientific conversations between those two when Henry is angry.

Ah, yes. Have some pickled McCoy. Careful, it's an aquired taste. Fun fact: Henry McCoy hated pickles, so I call this dish 'poetic justice'.

Anyway...

From a non narrative perspective, I have no idea. Obviously, they don't get along, and McCoy is more trouble than he's worth when you have your own evil agenda.

And, to be fair, it's not like the other mutants were losing sleep wondering where he was at. If he were fully brought back, they would just throw him in the pit (which could have been an interesting reflective moment for someone as they wondered why they were throwing one jackass McCoy away and sitting the other run amok.)

They just used him as a nod to the fact that he was no longer the 'darkest beast'. Insinuating that 616 Hank has surpassed 295 Henry in level of scientific/moral evils. No other reason. Ugh.

[thebettermccoy]

The way you write is pretty. Do you have written fanfics of dark beast?

Thank you! I'm glad that you think so. (My English degree isn't a waste, yay!)

The short answer is no. I do not have any fanfics that include Henry... or even the X-Men. Again, I felt (and still feel) like I couldn't do him (them) justice with longer form writing. The longer answer is yes, but I never posted them publicly, nor did they escape the culling during college.

I suck at creating a plot. My skills mainly lay in characterization and setting. That is an overreaching problem in all of my writing.

That being said, will I write something in the future? Maybe. Either as a one-shot or some sort of plot prompt is given to me... even co-writing is a possibility. (I already kind of have one with @beastandwolverine. Is it an RP or a collaboration fic featuring Henry and an OC character? I dunno, but it's here if you want to give it a read.)

[thebettermccoy]

I literally started choking on my chocolate protein shake when this appeared on my feed. While at work. My coworkers are concerned. I had to tell them it just went down the wrong pipe.

Anyway. Accurate.

Commission

Just a little thing I had done because I thought it was funny. If you're looking for a commission, omaik (here and here) has open slots for more!

[thebettermccoy]

Projecting on to Hank McCoy is so real tbh

Thank you?

It probably was not the healthiest of coping mechanisms, but I can think of way, way worse things I could have done as a teen.

But it did help me when I needed it most.

[thebettermccoy]

Wow, you loved the character for decades! Must be hard to see him from fun and loving to whatever he is now.

If ever possible, I wish the next writer who will be handling Beast has the same love and devotion to the character. Perhaps some solo comics too. But that's asking too much from marvel.

Would love to see dark beast too. I enjoyed these. I'm close to reading on age of apocalypse after I'm done with reading the others. His art is amazing and menacing, they catch the edgier vibe well.

Yeah, it's been a long time -- more than half of my life, which is wild to think about.

I hope that a writer who likes Beast (or at least doesn't hate him) creates a decent path for him to grow/change with.

They are releasing "X-Men of Apocolypse" as a reborn/new AoA in September. I am cautiously optimistic. At least Henry won't be a head in a glorified pickle jar.

[thebettermccoy]

[Yessss]

(twitter post link)

mannnn i hope the rest of the gang gets their turn on the variant covers for this series.........i love spending 7bucks on pieces of paper yippeeee<3

(mark brooks already posted other aoa stuff to his twitter anyway)

(plus bonus beast cuz oohhhh my god. oh my god.)

[thebettermccoy]

Your top favorite(s) artwork of dark beast. Or an art style that you are fond of, or find attractive.

Well, one would be my commission at SDCC 2014. (The artist said he loved doing uncommon commissions!)

I really love his design in Excalibur. The fucker is almost always smiling -- giving off that beautiful manic energy, which I find to be more threatening than just his "evil scientist" mode. (Also, his pants make me laugh. They are his shiny metal ones, but with this weird scrap -- cloth??? -- hanging from his beltline. What is that, Henry? wHAt iS tHAt?!?)

I MEAN, LOOK AT HIM. THAT WOMAN AGENT WAS THROWING HERSELF AT HIM FOR A VERY GOOD REASON!

(Girlfriend was ready to fuck him there in the supply room, right in front of her captain. She was so horny that it got her killed. Ooof.)

[thebettermccoy]

I'd love to know your fondness of og5 beast.

I'm sad that for a character that existed for so long is extremely underrated. And now many new comic readers or new in the world of x-men is instead introduced to Prime Beast of Krakoa. Turning people to absolutely hate him or anyone who likes him.

I believe it's too late now to return the original Beast. Even if cloned, he's a character forever ruined.

And now I'd love to hear more about the true, ever loving, bouncing blue beast from the past.

My fondness for OG5 Beast was forged through personal familiarity while reading the original 1960s/70s comics, rather than the quality of the writing or art style.

(Note: I don’t particularly recommend reading any of the X-Men comics until the late 70s/early 80s. The original five X-Men characters are bland as mashed potatoes without salt, with only the seasoning of cheesy/campiness for flavor. Do yourself a favor and read X-Men: First Class Tomorrow’s Brightest if you want to dive into Cyclops, Marvel Girl, Iceman, Beast, and Angel’s teen years. You’ll get all you need from that.)

A warning of sorts: this gets weirdly personal for me.

I was 13 or 14 when I started reading the old comics. I was a 5’9” girl with broad shoulders, size 11 feet, who spent class time reading books because the lessons bored me. I was about a head taller than everyone else (before the boys hit their growth spurts) and generally bigger than other girls my age (I wasn’t even really overweight; I was just built bigger). I felt like a monster; girls were supposed to be cute, petite, and dainty… apparently, my body didn’t get the memo.

You can see how an awkwardly proportioned girl was drawn to the character with big, broad shoulders, large hands and feet, and sounded like he ate a thesaurus…even if he was rather dull for a superhero. (Again, the 60s comics, blech!)  

When I saw Hank McCoy, I saw myself.

Sure, I was far from being a genius, I didn’t have super strength, and I couldn’t scale buildings with my bare hands and feet. But I knew what it was like to have my physical features stand out -- on the “higher end of normal”. 

I developed more empathy for him as a result. I truly cared about what happened to him in storylines. My self-absorbed, desperate-for-validation teenage self drew some wild mental gymnastic parallels between us that only increased my attachment. When Henry was transforming himself into the furry blue (originally gray) character we all know, I was in the throes of puberty and experiencing all the changes that entailed. When I got to his 80s adventures as an Avenger, I had finally found my niche of friends where I truly belonged. By the time I reached the 90’s and found myself rereading stories like AoA, I had reached my edgy, rebellious phase, and Dark Beast was right there. My life experiences streamed alongside reading experiences with Hank.

Eventually, I got older and busier. I was preparing for graduation, then attending college, and eventually earning my bachelor’s degree. I mostly stopped reading comics, and the comics I did read were either indie publications or more obscure titles like Great Lakes Avengers (Hello, Squirrel Girl!). There were no more parallels for me to draw with Hank, but I no longer needed to anyway.

But my love for Hank/Henry/Beast never went away. In fact, I became embarrassed by it. X-Men wasn’t exactly popular among my college peers (Marvel movies were juuust becoming more popular with the release of the Avengers in 2012, so a lot of people didn’t even know Marvel well), and any time I began talking about it, I would get a weird blank stare. I wrote a blog post called Nature vs Nurture: Comparing Beast and Dark Beast on WordPress and then deleted the account. I threw away the majority of the fan art I drew in my sketchbooks -- but I’m thankful a couple of drawings escaped the culling. I almost wrote my 401 Literature paper on “The Uncanny of the Uncanny X-Men” and then didn’t because I was embarrassed, and I instead wrote one on Queer Coding in Harry Fucking Potter, AND I HATE THAT I DIDN’T JUST WRITE THE DAMN X-MEN ONE.

The only time I felt okay with letting my X-Men freak flag fly was during the two years I was blessed with San Diego Comic-Con passes. I commissioned one of OG Hank in 2013 and one of Henry in 2014, and kept them tucked away in a binder to keep them safe and out of the way.

It wasn’t until after 2015, when I graduated and returned to my bubble, that I resumed my hobby. I caught up with All-New X-Men -- back to OG Hank. I couldn’t help but feel like I had come full circle in some way. 

I’m in my thirties now, and I’ve gotten over myself; I like the X-Men and I have a particular fixation on Hank McCoy. I’m content, my husband is supportive, and now I run this blog.   

So, you can imagine how I’ve felt for years about what Marvel Comics has been doing to Hank…and to Henry. Oh my stars and garters! 

Yes, in a way, it is ‘too late’. They have written him into the ground.

But time goes on, and new readers come into the fold. Reboots are made, and different writers are hired. Maybe Henry McCoy will get the justice he deserves (The MCU is bringing the X-Men into the fold, and I have hope that its popularity will spark change). But perhaps he won’t. Either way, I’ll still be as much of a fan of him at 93 as I was at 13.

[thebettermccoy]

What is your favorite comics of dark beast? What was your first comic that made you love him, thus this blog exists?

He's quite an interesting character. More preferable than what recent beast (ben percy) is. He'd probably be back in the future, but I don't think I'm ready how new writers will handle dark beast now that he's a head in a jar.

These are fantastic questions with answers that twist and branch into different directions like the roots of a gnarled old tree, but I'll try to keep my response 'brief', otherwise you're getting a novel of a response.

Let's start with your second question, as I'd like to start at the beginning. What was the first comic that made you love [Henry]?

I could say that it was his first appearance in Age of Apocalypse because that would be kind of true, but it isn't the full answer.

Age of Apocalypse was my first introduction to the X-Men. I saw the completed collection (four books in total) on the shelves of the Borders bookstore in 2006, and 13-year-old me thought they looked interesting. I begged my dad to buy me the first one. Then, eventually, he bought the rest for me because I had to know what happened next. Dark Beast was fun in a hokey mad scientist way. I was a sucker for the trope (and as far as appearances, I was beginning to learn that I had a type.)

But the collection stops after AoA does, and I had to know the different place he was teleported to. Still, I couldn't find further books with my limited resources at the time (as Borders had a sporadic stock of X-Men material).

So, when people said X-Men, they were talking about 616, but I associated them with 295. 295 was my canon for several months until my dad explained that the X-Men storyline was much, much larger than AoA. Knowing next to nothing about comics in general , I said I wanted to start at the very beginning so that this time, I would know the whole story and not miss out on anything.

I spent an entire year reading X-Men comics published in the 1960s and 1970s, which was an experience, to say the least, and very much a product of its time — X-Men vs. Frankenstein's monster about did me in — but I digress. Over this time, I developed a strong fondness for the OG5 Beast, which was both distinct yet loosely tied to Dark Beast. (I could go into the personal reasons for this fondness, but I'll save that for another time if there is any interest.)

To put it simply, Beast was solidified as my favorite 616 character throughout all of my reading. Intelligent, kind, funny, and a bit weird, I followed Hank's journey through the Avengers. The 80s were truly his prime, in my humble opinion.

Eventually, I got into the 90s era of X-Men and found myself right back where I started, this time with a new perspective and a strong focus on Henry McCoy. And I will say that the second read-through hit differently.

Here was my favorite character, twisted into a dark version of himself, molded by a cruel, unforgiving world...and he loved it. A fuzzy weirdo who was unapologetically evil in the name of science. I LOVED that.

But which version of Henry McCoy did I love more?

In 2007, X-Men: Endangered Species was released. Both versions of my favorite character together in multiple issues? I skipped right over the rest of the early 2000s to dive right into that. Hank was struggling and desperate to try and save the mutant species, and Henry was an absolute asshat -- and I fucking adored it. By a single gray hair, Dark Beast won out as my favorite.

This leads into your send question: What is your favorite comic of Dark Beast?

Well, for a long while, it was Endangered Species. I read that book All. The. Fucking. Time.

Then, I got ahold of the Dark X-Men collection in 2014/2015. I was a few years late to the game, but I had graduated from high school and gone off to college — you know the song and dance of early adulthood, where you're too busy to do anything more than work/school? Yeah, that.

Have you ever wanted Dark Beast portrayed with a dash of mania reminiscent of Avengers Hank, yet still absolutely evil? Have you ever wanted to read a nice short story (5 issues) on dysfunctional and amoral characters trying to be public 'heroes'? Read it. Read it. Read it. Henry is in the main cast, and every moment he is there is a fucking terrible delight. Fraction and Dodson, I tip my hat to you.

As for the blog, well. I was very hesitant to ever make it. As a woman, could I accurately portray an evil male character? Despite him being my favorite character for literally more than half my life -- I felt like I wouldn't do him justice.

However, I took the plunge after the Krakoa era revealed that his character had been reduced to a head in a jar, while at the same time, goddamn Apocalypse and Sinister were allowed to run amok, and 616 Hank became evil (self-sabotaging, self-righteous, fascist, for-the-greater-good, boring evil). Why the fuck wasn't my dude getting his fair share? (Like, wouldn't it have been interesting if the tables were turned and members of Karkoa/The Quiet Counsel realized that they somehow trusted Dark Beast more than Hank at this point? Either a storyline where Dark Beast becomes the lesser of two evils or where Dark Beast does something so drastic that it pulls Hank's head out of his own ass and is pushed back over the hero line?) But Percy hates Beast, so fuck anything actually interesting happening.

Fuck all that. I knew I could do better than that.

(Also, a little reassurance from @positivelybeastly that I wouldn't be stepping on their toes also helped.)

So what's next?

I don't know. I haven't read any of the post- Krakoa stuff (though I just bought the first volume, which should arrive this weekend). I didn't even read Krakoa; I learned all I needed to through social media and Google images.

Maybe he will be restored Deus Ex Sinister. I'd like to see a minor character, whether idiotic, ignorant, or desperate, find his head and give him a body... that would at least be something on screen instead of the Dark Beast reappearing again with another case of "I got better".

Marvel, please let me into the writing room when you want to bring him back. I don't even want credit. I want results.

(Did I say that I wasn't going to give you a novel? I didn't: I gave you a novella.)

TLDR: AoA was technically the first comic that made me love to hate (and hate to love) Henry, but Endangered Species solidified it. The Dark X-Men is my favorite comic featuring him. His head-in-a-jar status on Krakoa was a terrible decision, but it gave me the confidence to create this blog. Marvel: Please let me write his re-introduction.

[thebettermccoy]

[I'd argue that it's always a threat. ]