The Beast
44 years ago - Anatoli Knyazev is born in the village of Gavrilovskoye, Russia.
28 years ago - 16-year-old Anatoli kills his father and joins the Russian Army.
25 years ago - 19-year-old Anatoli serves with the Russian Army as it quells several breakaway Republics, amassing a staggering kill count. He is punitively expelled from the army for his brutality, but recruited by the covert organization The Hammer as a candidate for their experimental cybernetic implants.
21 years ago - 23-year-old Anatoli is subjected to a series of operations to install a suite of cybernetic implants. He becomes The Hammer's dedicated assassin, given the codename The Beast.
14 years ago - 30-year-old Anatoli is named as a member of the government-sanctioned organization The People's Heroes, assigned by The Hammer to monitor the other members.
12 years ago -32-year-old Anatoli & The People's Heroes are unable to stop Ben Turner from assassinating a Russian Pakhan for the League of Assassins.
8 years ago - 36-year-old Anatoli takes control of The People's Heroes when Ivan Illyich Gort attempts to defect. While the rest of the team tries to stop him non-lethally, He kills him with an experimental handheld railgun.
7 years ago - 37-year-old Anatoli is disavowed when The Hammer is shut down by the Russian government. Given his final instructions by The Hammer's leader Zhores Kunaev before his suicide, he travels to Gotham to eliminate the ten representatives of the Strategic Unified Defense conference. He kills over 100 people through bombings and poisoned gas attached before he is confronted by Batman, who leaves him trapped in the sewers. He escapes by cutting off his own arm.
6 years ago - 38-year-old Anatoli kills 63 former Russian state operatives to steal operation funds formerly allocated to The Hammer, redirecting the organization into international smuggling and drug trafficking.
4 years ago - 40-year-old Anatoli kills several major international weapons smugglers, usurping their markets. He becomes the main weapon dealer for Kobra.
3 years ago - 41-year-old Anatoli returns to Gotham during the No Man's Land quakes, stalking anyone associated with Batman, almost killing Jim Gordon, Tim Drake & Helena Bertinelli before Bruce tricks him into coming into the open for a fight and taking him out with the Batwing. He manages to survive and get out of the city.
1 year ago - 43-year-old Anatoli begins killing Tobias Whale's men as he moves into territory in Bludhaven. Dick Grayson & Cassandra Cain disassemble his organization before it can be established. He attempts to destroy the city with a Thermobaric Daisy-Cutter Bomb, but he is found by Tim Drake.
You'd think that KGBeast is very much from a very particular time; a product of Cold War fearmongering. Truthfully, however he comes from only just slightly PAST that time, when the world seemed to be moving beyond that sort of thing, allowing stories with a little more nuance. Of course, even if the STORY has nuance, the character certainly didn't. He's a really over the top villain, sort of a proto-Bane. We've seen him crop up a few times more recently (he's the guy who shot Dick Grayson and gave him amnesia for way too long), but he winds up having a LOT of utility for us, so I hope you enjoy all the stuff we did with him.
KGBeast's Comic HistoryKGBeast first showed up in his very own four-issue story "Ten Nights of the Beast" by Jim Starlin from 1988. I really like this story; it's very much a product of it's time, but it's well told, and KGBeast becomes a very cool villain, even though his costume is clearly fetishwear (the red parts used to be bare skin). He's a very scary, extremely violent assassin, and it becomes a really great game of cat and mouse with lots of collateral damage. At one point, Batman manages to catch KGBeasts hand, but he immediately escapes by chopping his own hand off with an ax, continuing in the same story with a red handgun appendage. Infamously, this story ends in the sewers of Gotham, with the Beast beckoning Batman to follow him into an enclosed room to fight to the death, but Batman instead just backs out and closes the door, supposedly trapping him to die there. It's a very contentious moment in Batman lore, one of the most noted instances of post-crisis Batman possibly actually killing someone.
He survived, of course, and went on to appear multiple times as a recurring Batman villain. The Soviet Union ceased to exist only 3 years after that introductory story, and he's never really been a top-tear baddie since then, but has always been at least a major violent threat in the world of DC assassins. |
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Our Beast StoryThere is a ton we get to do here. First of all... we actually did have every intention of just calling him KGBeast. There didn't really seem to be a timeline problem; all of his exploits happen well after the fall of the Soviet Union even in the sliding timeline, but he could easily just be referencing the former Soviet Committee for State Security. In the comic, his actual name is the Beast, while KGBeast was just a name given to him by the CIA... and of course there's also the fact that we deliberately haven't included real world agencies like the CIA or FBI in favor of groups like Argus or the DEO. There's even a pre-existing organization that sponsors KGBeast in the comics; The Hammer. So in the end, it kind of just made more sense to just refer to him as The Beast and trust you guys to get it.
Once we built up his backstory using his pretty well-defined origins, we got to make him part of the original lineup for our Russian government-sanctioned organization The People's Heroes, because at that time he was essentially a government operative. He gets to play a big role in the history of that team before we go on to make our version of the originalTen Days of the Beast story. We were a little careful with the wording so it doesn't look like Batman deliberately left him to die. Your mileage may vary, but to us that's just not something Batman can do. He's gone on in the comics to menace several other members of the Bat Family, so we filled up his timeline with big stories where he interacts with practically everyone, even threatening to blow up Bludhaven. This is a character who doesn't need to appear a lot but should have huge, violent impact when he does. |