Issue(s): Amazing Adventures #11
Cover Date: Mar 72
Title: "The Beast!"
Credits:
Gerry Conway - Writer
Tom Sutton - Penciler
Syd Shores - Inker

Review/plot:
The Beast has left the X-Men and gone to work as a scientist for the Brand Corporation where he finds himself in conflict with another scientist, Carl Maddicks, but in love with his assistant Linda Donaldson. McCoy is researching the secrets of mutation and he develops a potion that he thinks will temporarily turn anyone into a mutant. When he discovers a plot by Maddicks, he takes the potion as a way to go into action without revealing his secret identity.

He winds up not really needing to go into action at all (Brand's security cops had things under control)...

...but he gets trapped in his Beast form and goes berserk, nearly killing people.

Donaldson assassinates Maddicks, saying she is his "replacement".

The narration is in the second person, with Gerry Conway constantly asking annoying, melodramatic questions of the protagonist ("Remember, Hank McCoy? Remember how it all seemed like a dream...?")

Quality Rating: C-

Historical Significance Rating: 5 - the Beast gets blue (or at least blue-grey) and fuzzy for the first time. First Brand Corporation. Also the first appearance of Carl Maddicks, the father of Artie from X-Factor.

Chronological Placement Considerations: I've pushed this back in publication time a bit to allow for Iron Man's appearance in issue #12, which takes place after after Iron Man #47.

References: N/A

Crossover: N/A

Continuity Insert? N

My Reprint: Marvel Milestones: Beast and Kitty Pryde

I had to go check the Carl Maddicks page after you wrote he was assassinated, thinking to myself, wait "he's Artie's dad and he shows up in the start of X-Factor and dies there, handing off Artie."

I can't decide if I just don't look the way Hank originally looked with fur or if it's just the artist. I think more the latter.

I think that Tom Sutton's horror-comic style works really well here, as the story has an EC kinda feel to me. It's true that the writing isn't particularly inspired, but I think that the art does a very good job of telling the story emotionally.

I found the flashback of Beast leaving Xaviers to be interesting, too. It's an early exploration of what life is like in X-Men land during the interregnum before Krakoa, and owing perhaps to the mood of the primary story, it's interestingly dark. The connotations of Xavier not wanting to let his students go for their own good feels really modern, and more in tune with the strangling paranoia of the late 80s X-Men rather than the freewheeling 70s that are to come. (Specifically, it reminds me of Magneto's problems with the New Mutants leading up to Inferno.)

Moral of the story: Keep your super-hero mask in your pocket, even if you think you're not going to need it. Because you never know...

Solo Beast joined Hulk and Iron Man in the "started off grey" club.

Stan Lee is on record saying that the meta-reason why the Hulk went from gray to green was because of color consistency problems in printing gray colors on pulp paper comics. I wonder if the change to blue for Beast's fur might have been done for similar reasons. His shade of gray looks a little too light in these scans, but if they had used a darker gray, it would have made it hard or impossible to see the black hair details, in at least some percentage of the final production copies of the comic.

In these older comics, the printer resolution was lower, or "grainier," and the "gray" colors were made by printing grids of tiny black dots over the semi-white background of the pulp paper stock. They didn't use separate ink colors for grays, they just used less black ink.

There's a long tradition of using blue instead of gray for hair highlights in comics going back at least as far as the 1940s (notably Wonder Woman and Superman). Again, maybe for the same reasons?

Coloring in the early days of comics was primitive in a way that's hard to believe these days. They had a grand total of 64 colors to work with: all the possible combinations of 0%, 25%, 50%, and 100% of cyan, yellow, and magenta. Black could only be 100%, unless the artist applied Zip-a-tone himself, which was unheard-of in the earliest days. Gray was created by combining 25% yellow, 25% cyan, and 25% magenta. (Cover coloring could be more technically sophisticated, which is why Beast is actually gray on the covers, but this more complex, slightly lavender on the inside.) The paper and printing were so bad in the early issues of the Hulk that the colors deviated too much to keep that gray stable, but by this time that wasn't an issue anymore. Black Panther was also this tri-tone gray in his early appearances. The decision to make him and Beast blue was an aesthetic one; gray was just too dull.

Thanks for linking that article about the 4 color process, & for correcting my misconceptions about the standard flat gray colors. Good article, nice and concise. Black could only be 100% in a single dot because black couldn't be mixed with the other three lighter colors. Zip-a-tone was used at least as early as the 1950s & can be seen in a lot of EC color comics & Warren black & white magazines. It was used on a few Marvel and DC comics from the late 1960s, particularly over Neal Adams pencils. Gray approximations could also be achieved by black stippling or cross-hatching over the more or less white paper background.

As a comics buyer I saw very little difference in printing quality between early & mid sixties comics & the comics produced in the early seventies, such as this comic. As a kid I learned to stand at the spinner rack & flip through all the copies of a given issue, looking for the copy with the best printing quality to purchase. Colors were often out of register. The ink might be heavier or lighter on some copies. You could sometimes find copies where the printer had completely run dry of ink of a particular color. Paper thickness would vary & colors would often bleed through the thin pulp paper stock, & be visible from the other side of the page. Sometimes the art would be clipped off at the edges of pages because the paper would wander away from the plates in the web printing process.

128 colors didn't start 'til 1973 via Murphy Anderson's Visual Concepts.