Merge:Dark Beast

Dark Beast (Henry Philip McCoy) is a Marvel Comics supervillain, an evil, alternate reality version of the X-Men's Beast. Created by Scott Lobdell and Roger Cruz, he first appeared in X-Men: Alpha (1995).

In the "Age of Apocalypse" reality, McCoy was a nefarious geneticist who implemented cruel experiments under tyrant Apocalypse. He was one of a handful of characters to escape the Age of Apocalypse reality to the regular Marvel universe, where he has continued his unethical experiments. Of that handful, he is the last one still alive.

Character biography
In the alternate dimension he came from, Hank McCoy was a mad scientist working for Sinister in his breeding pens, intent on breeding more powerful mutants according to Apocalypse's "survival of the fittest" dogma. While Sinister was methodical and rational in his experiments, McCoy, ruthless as his mentor, delighted in causing pain to his lab subjects and in the cruelty of his experiments, which is why he was nicknamed the Beast both by prisoners and Sinister's Elite Mutant Force. McCoy also experimented on himself in order to further his mutation, and gained his ape-like feral appereance. Any mutant that he deemed unworthy was turned into a genetic stew that was used to create Apocalypse's army of Infinites.

Besides being one of the creators of the Infinites, the Dark Beast also experimented on Blink, on Jamie Madrox (thus being one of the creators of The Madri), merged all of the Power siblings into one hideous creature, made Nemesis into Holocaust following his defeat at the hands of Magneto and was also responsible for the creation of Holocaust's lead hunter Wolverine (not to be confused with the Wolverine of the X-Men, who was known only as Weapon X in that reality).

With the end of the Age of Apocalypse, the Dark Beast was able to escape into Earth 616 through the M'Kraan Crystal. He was believed to have died due to Quicksilver's interference in his set trajectory. However, the only damage was that he landed twenty years in the past in the Morlock Tunnels. Upon his arrival he was met by a young Emma Frost, who helped him to regain some of his scattered memories (shown in Generation X minus 1). At this point, the writers wrote a retcon and made the Dark Beast responsible for the creation of the Morlocks.

The Dark Beast later kidnapped the real Beast and kept him a prisoner. He infiltrated the X-Men in his place by genetically altering his appearance to have the real McCoy's fur color and texture. He was able to keep up his ruse until the Onslaught Saga, during which the Dark Beast joined Onslaught.

He also had a few run-ins with Generation X and Gene Nation, first behind the scenes in Generation X #6 and then in the crossover of X-Man #50 and Generation X #50. There he made a cameo as the leader of the newly revamped Gene Nation (although through the robotic body of Wynter), attempting to capture Generation X in order to experiment on them. He led an incarnation of the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants was said to have created the Morlocks

Right before House of M, the Dark Beast was in Genosha where he joined Xavier's team after being offered parole, though he may have had his own agenda. It was confirmed in The 198 Files one-shot that he stayed powered after M-Day.

It should be noted that Dark Beast always has a fiendish previous version of Beast's look. Originally, he was grey (just like Earth-616 - Beast was for a while), before he mutated himself to have Beast's blue simian look. Now, Beast has gained a feline look, while Dark Beast retains his blue simian look, but in a shade of dark blue closer to Nightcrawler's hue.

Powers and abilities
The Dark Beast has the same superhuman abilities and intelligence as the Beast before Beast went through his most recent mutation thanks to Sage. However, he is not physically as strong as his counterpart was in the normal Marvel continuity due to the fact he did not train on a regular basis.

While as intelligent as his counter-part, "normal" Beast seems to possess a larger spectrum of knowledge, as evidenced when Dark Beast was infiltrating the X-Men, he became annoyed at the amount of knowledge the X-Men expected him to possess. This is due to Dark Beast specalising in genetics, while 616 Beast maintained study in multiple fields.

Appearances in other media
In the X-Men Legends II: Rise of Apocalypse video game, Dark Beast appears as a brainwashed Beast, believing himself to be a follower of Mr. Sinister and Apocalypse. He battles the player as a boss along with Mr. Sinister.