The Road To Marvel’s Summer X-Men Event — ‘DNX’
by Tony Thornley
Late last week, Marvel Comics announced DNX, a late summer event featuring the X-Men and Fantastic Four fighting a massive outbreak of a mutating virus. The event’s main villain is an evil, corrupted version of the original X-Man Beast, so how did we get from there to here?
The upcoming event from Jed MacKay and Federico Vicentini will see the mutant supremacy organization 3K unleash the X-Virus on a major population center. Following the Age of Revelation event, Cyclops and the Chairman — AKA the original Hank McCoy — returned to the present with knowledge of what’s coming next. Cyclops has decided to use it to prevent that dark future; Hank is going to use it to make sure they own it.
Most fans would remember Beast as the happy-go-lucky science hero of the X-Men though. So what happened to make him try to mutate an entire major city and ensure mutants are on top of the world? We assembled a rough timeline of how we got from there to here.
X-Cutioner’s Song: Yes, this timeline starts 33 years ago, with X-Cutioner’s Song, a major X-Men event. Where it’s relevant to this storyline is that the climax of that event saw Mutant Liberation Front leader and terrorist Stryfe unleash the Legacy Virus. The virus would only infect mutants and was always eventually fatal — overloading a mutant’s powers in an often explosive way. (Yes, there were parallels to the AIDS crisis, but like all parts of the mutant metaphor, it wasn’t a one to one.)
For the next decade, curing the Legacy Virus became Hank McCoy’s entire motivation, culminating in 2001’s Uncanny X-Men #390, in which Hank was able to finally synthesize the cure, but was horrified to learn that it required one final infection. Piotr Rasputin would take the burden on himself, and used the serum to release the cure at the cost of his own life. (This is most relevant as it gradually transformed Hank from the happy-go-lucky hero to a much more tragic figure.)
New X-Men through Astonishing X-Men: Over the course of the next five years after Colossus’s death, we saw Hank’s morality gradually slip into something more and more ambiguous as he began to lose his humanity, mutating into a more cat-like form.
House of M and the Decimation: In the aftermath of 2005’s House of M, only 198 mutants were left on the planet. This sent Hank on a journey to try to re-ignite the mutant gene, a journey that led him down some very questionable and morally grey paths. Simultaneously, Hank kept challenging Cyclops and tried to position himself as a paragon, in direct contradiction to his actions trying to cure the Decimation.
All-New X-Men: Hank’s questionable morality continues to lead to dark decisions as he uses a time platform to kidnap his original class of X-Men to, essentially, punch modern Cyclops in the face after modern Scott goes down an apparent dark path himself. This leads to the entirety of the X-Men confronting Hank about why he keeps doing stupid, destructive and potentially evil things. Interestingly, Hank is set up as a dark parallel here to Wolverine, as Logan evolves more and more into a traditionally heroic figure rather than his more violent, anti-heroic past over the same period.
X-Force and Defender of Krakoa: Over the course of 50 X-Force issues starting in 2019, writer Benjamin Percy picked up the threads left by everyone else, and transformed Beast over time from a morally ambiguous intelligence operator to a villain and war criminal.
His crimes in this time included (but isn’t limited to) taking over an entire Latin American country and installing himself as its shadow leader; kidnapping one of his closest friends, killing him and transforming him into a mindless murder drone; and attempting to destroy Krakoa’s enemies with a sci-fi nuke. This years-long story ended with Hank seemingly dead with a younger clone of himself in his place, missing his memories since leading the Defenders.
3K: Since the beginning of From The Ashes, the X-Men have been menaced by 3K, an organization with the goal of replacing humanity with mutantkind by the year 3000. The group is led by a committee consisting of Astra, Cassandra Nova and the mysterious Chairman.
Meanwhile, the X-Men are approached by Doug Ramsey, not enhanced by Apocalypse and a fugitive. This prompts a chronological trigger, as Cyclops’s mind is swapped with his future self’s. Future Cyclops is shocked that his travelling companion, Beast, didn’t make the trip with him. Meanwhile, present Cyclops notices that there’s something wrong with Beast, who also claimed to be from his present, in the midst of attempting to stop Revelation and deal with the genome altering X-Virus.
Upon their return, Cyclops learns that Hank stayed the entire time, making him wonder who was with him in the Age of Revelation. This is where the Chairman’s identity as the original Beast is revealed, and he uses his future knowledge to start to advance his plans much more rapidly…
What’s Beast up to this time? Well, we know he’s releasing his version of the X-Virus, but beyond that, you’ll have to read DNX #1 on September 2nd, 2026, from Marvel Comics.
