This is Foggy Ruins of Time, a feature that provides the cultural context behind certain comic book characters/behaviors. You know, the sort of then-topical references that have faded into the “foggy ruins of time.” To wit, twenty years from now, a college senior watching episodes of "Seinfeld" will likely miss a lot of the then-topical pop culture humor (like the very specific references in “The Understudy” to the Nancy Kerrigan/Tonya Harding scandal).

Today, based on a suggestion by reader Bert G., we take a look at whether Beast's evolution as a character was influenced by a famous pulp fiction supporting character.

A lot of this discussion really turns on how the creative process on X-Men worked between Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. Stan Lee's version of events was that he came up with the idea for a team of mutants and Martin Goodman told him he couldn't use the title "The Mutants," so Lee and Kirby came up with the X-Men. Now, here is Kirby in a 1987 interview with Leonard Pitts talking about how he created the X-Men, "The X-Men, I did the natural thing there. What would you do with mutants who were just plain boys and girls and certainly not dangerous? You school them. You develop their skills. So I gave them a teacher, Professor X.

Of course, it was the natural thing to do, instead of disorienting or alienating people who were different from us, I made the X-Men part of the human race, which they were. Possibly, radiation, if it is beneficial, may create mutants that’ll save us instead of doing us harm. I felt that if we train the mutants our way, they’ll help us– and not only help us, but achieve a measure of growth in their own sense. And so, we could all live together."

I think that there likely exists a middle ground where Lee did come up with the idea of doing a comic about mutants and then Kirby came up with everything else. In any event, while I'm certainly not saying that Lee had zero presence in the creation of the original members of the X-Men, from what we've seen from Lee and Kirby, it was more likely that Kirby was coming up with the characters once given the prompt of "A book about mutants." Lee would then do the dialogue for the comics.

This is important when it comes to the Beast. When the Beast was introduced, he was basically sort of like a mini-version of the Thing in his attitude and demeanor...

He did not even wear glasses in his civilian identity of Hank McCoy. That was the case for the first three issues, but then, in X-Men #4, we see the Beast wearing glasses, reading a book and doing math problems with his feet...

In the following issue, he describes himself as an honors student and by X-Men #6, he was the typical high-faluting, big-word-using Beast that we all know and, for many years, loved. See him in battle with Namor, as he irritates the sea king with his highbrow talkin'...

Even by 1963, Jack Kirby was getting a pretty free hand when it came to plotting the books that Lee and Kirby worked together on. However, Lee would still occasionally make alterations after the fact. One of the most infamous examples is when Kirby introduced the Enclave, a group of scientists who were Objectivists obsessed with creating the perfect human, but when they did so, their creation (known as Him. Later known as Adam Warlock) judged them as inferior and killed them. Lee decided to instead make the Enclave typical criminal scientists just trying to create a being who could conquer the world. Kirby would hen have to adjust his plots to match what Lee had altered the story to, and if you know how comic books are produced, that means that Kirby would have finished plotting issue #xx and started issue #xy, only for Lee to alter the plot of issue #xx, meaning that Kirby would have to alter stuff he had already done on issue #xy. Kirby would obviously first just try to "fix" the new pages, but if the changes were too big, he'd have to toss the work he had already done and do new pages, and Kirby wouldn't get paid for the unused pages (decades later, that was used as evidence to argue that Kirby was, in fact, a freelancer and not an employee, as the argument was that Marvel only bought the work they used, suggesting that he was selling them each individual page).

So, with that in mind, again, the most likely scenario is that Jack Kirby came up with a basic idea for the Beast as a character, Stan Lee then gave the character dialogue, perhaps crafting a specific personality with that dialogue and then...a change occurred. What we don't know is WHY there was a change. Did Jack Kirby make the change? Or did Stan Lee decide to make the change?

It matters because of their respective backgrounds as fans of pulp fiction. Both Lee and Kirby were big pulp fiction readers (as were almost every major comic book creator of the era). However, while Kirby certainly read Doc Savage pulp fiction, Lee was a BIG Doc Savage fan. The great Will Murray, who has forgotten more about Doc Savage that I'll ever know, once interviewed Lee about Doc Savage (you can read it in TwoMorrows' Alter Ego #150) and Lee spoke about how much he loved Doc Savage (while, of course, at the same time insisting that certain elements from his comic book work that were similar to Doc Savage stories were total coincidences).

Doc Savage was a pulp hero who debuted in 1933 by Street & Smith Publications (the publisher of the company, Henry W. Ralston, and the main editor, John L. Nanovic, came up with the basic idea of the new hero to build on the success of their then-new pulp hero, The Shadow, and assigned writer Lester Dent to turn their premise into a reality). He was basically the ideal hero. He was a scientist, he was as doctor, he was a detective, he was a general adventurer - he was the whole kit and caboodle.

Savage was aided on his adventures by the Fabulous Five, five specialists/assistants. His most famous assistant was Lt. Colonel Andrew Blodgett Mayfair, better known as Monk, because his long, muscular arms and his sunken forehead made him look like a monkey.

The idea of a guy who looked like a gorilla also being a brilliant scientist was a great hook and that's why Monk became by far the most remembered of Doc Savage's friends and associates. The visual of the character is strikingly similar to that of the revamped version of the Beast. Here is Monk with Doc (this isn't a vintage drawing, but this depicts Monk as he is described in the stories)...

EDITED TO ADD: Will Murray wrote me to note that Beast's loquaciousness was ALSO similar to ANOTHER one of Doc Savage's assistants, William Harper "Johnny" Littlejohn, so it's possible that Lee was inspired by TWO of Doc's assistants with how Beast was written from X-Men #4 forwards.

I've seen people try to tie Stan Lee to specific Doc Savage stories (there's one involving cosmic rays, for instance), but I think it's one thing to say, "I think Stan Lee was influenced by this specific issue of Doc Savage" and a whole other thing to say that "Stan Lee, big fan of Doc Savage, was influenced by the most popular supporting character in the series."

So if we were to believe that it was Stan Lee who suggested the alterations to the Beast that started in X-Men #4, then I think there's a very good argument to be made that Monk Mayfair (and perhaps Johnny Littlejohn) was an influence on the changes. If it was Kirby who changed the idea, Kirby was ALSO a fan of the pulps (and undoubtedly Doc Savage), so it's still a possibility, but I don't think it's quite as likely.

So there ya go, Bert, that's my take on Monk's influence on the Beast. Thanks to Will for the extra insight!

If anyone else has any suggestions for Foggy Ruins of Time, feel free to e-mail me at brianc@cbr.com