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BiographyBarnell first began to mutate into a bird-like human when he hit puberty. The X-Men Jean Grey and Scott Summers approached his parents and offered him a place at the Xavier Institute for Higher Learning. At the Institute, he chose "the Beak" as his mutant name. It was what a girl in his native Rotterdam called him when the locals found him hiding behind some beer barrels. One of the Institute's teachers, Dr. Henry McCoy (a.k.a. the Beast), took a particular interest in him. Beast was concerned to see that, even among his fellow mutants, Barnell was still lonely, isolated and insecure about his freakish appearance.
When Beak went to the school's laboratory to entrust his prize titanium baseball bat to Beast, he found the villainess Cassandra Nova mentally attacking his teacher. Cassandra had taken over Professor X's body and infiltrated the X-Men by posing as their founder and headmaster. She used her vast telepathic powers to turn Beak against Beast. Unable to fight off her control, Beak beat Beast to a bloody pulp with his bat. The psychic battering left Beak catatonic, and he was placed in a medical tank. [New X-Men #117]
Beak remained catatonic for some time. In the meantime, Cassandra Nova brainwashed the Shi'ar empress Lilandra into declaring war on the X-Men. During the Shi'ar Imperial Guard's assault on the Xavier Institute, the telepathic collective known as the Stepford Cuckoos devised a means of helping the X-Men. They enlisted the help of their fellow student Angel Salvadore, a girl with fly-like wings and toxic vomit, to collect a sample of Cassandra Nova's tissue from the school laboratory. There, Angel found and freed a stark naked and traumatized Beak from his tank. His suggestion of interrogating the synthetic Shi'ar creature named Stuff enabled the Cuckoos to remove the helmet the aliens had placed on their teacher Emma Frost to keep her from accessing her telepathic powers. When Cassandra Nova herself arrived at the Institute, Jean Grey and Professor X joined forces to expel her from his body. Emma then tricked the bodiless Cassandra into entering Stuff, whom she'd encoded with Cassandra's tissue sample to be an exact duplicate of her real body. Once Cassandra was inside Stuff, Jean and Professor X were able to reprogram and rehabilitate her mind. [New X-Men #125-126] 
Beak later volunteered to go out to space to help with the relief work for the Shi'ar, hoping he'd find acceptance with the aliens. Angel, in her typical acerbic fashion, shot down his hopes, his appearance and his general existence. He tried to fly off to the Shi'ar flagship, but plummeted to the ground before he could make it. Angel then kissed him on a bet from their classmates, but Barnell, oblivious to this, fell madly in love with her. He decided to stay on Earth so he could be with Angel. [New X-Men #131]
Beak and Angel were assigned to the Institute's Special Class, which was taught by the Chinese mutant Xorn. Here, Beak found acceptance and friends, as the Special Class was composed of mutants just as strange as he was. The other students were Ernst (the rehabilitated Cassandra Nova, now programmed to look like a little girl), Martha Johansson (a disembodied telepathic brain), Basilisk (a one-eyed mutant who could emit a strobe light from his brain) and Dummy (a sentient gas encased in a latex suit). The class went camping in the woods near the X-Mansion, not knowing that a contingent of U-Men were nearby, watching them and planning to harvest their mutant parts. At night, Beak and Angel snuck away from the Special Class to get drunk and have sex. Beak got cold feet at the last moment and was interrupted by the timely attack of the U-Men. When Xorn left the Special Class to confront the U-Men, Beak tried to rally his classmates to aid their teacher. He also saved Dummy by plugging up the hole in his suit with a condom. Working together, the Special Class managed to subdue a U-Man. [New X-Men #135-136] 
At the same time, a group of violent, dissident students known as the Omega Gang subdued Professor X and siezed control of the school during Open Day. Led by the powerful young telepath Quentin Quire, the Omega Gang went on a rampage induced by the power-amplifying drug Kick. They attacked the visiting humans, teachers and students. The X-Men were eventually able to stop the riot, but not before the students lost a few of their number. Dummy's suit got torn and he evaporated, essentially "dying" in Beak's arms. Sophie of the Stepford Cuckoos also died in her efforts to stop Quentin. Quentin himself died as a result of his abuse of Kick.
On the way to the Institute's prize giving ceremony (in which both Beak and Angel were awarded for their heroism in dealing with the U-Men), Angel revealed to Beak that he'd gotten her pregnant. Guess he should have saved that condom after all. [New X-Men #137-138] Shortly afterwards, Emma Frost's diamond body was found shattered into a million pieces by an unknown assailant. The former X-Men Bishop and Sage came to the Institute to investigate the murder. When Bishop questioned Angel about her possible involvement in it, Beak feared the worst and confessed to the crime in an attempt to divert suspicion from her. He claimed that the reason he did it was because Emma was going to tell the staff he'd gotten Angel pregnant with "monster babies" and that they'd be expelled for it. Naturally, neither Beast nor Professor X believed him. Professor X also quelled Beak's fears about being expelled by telling him that he was one of the Institute's most valued students. 
Following a lead given to them by a former member of the Omega Gang about where they used to get Kick, Sage went to a shack on the school grounds and found dozens of gigantic larvae hanging from the ceiling. She returned to the shack with Bishop, Professor X, Xorn and Beak, where they found that Angel had already given birth to half a dozen part-fly, part-bird, part-human babies. Beak, seeing his children for the first time, promptly fell in love with them.
In the meantime, Jean Grey resurrected Emma with the Phoenix Force, and it was revealed that Esme, a Stepford Cuckoo and Emma's favorite student, had mind controlled Angel into committing the murder as well as engineered her sister Sophie's death in order to gain control over the other Cuckoos. Once her treachery was found out, Esme broke away from the Cuckoo collective and left the Institute. [New X-Men #140-141] Some time later, Xorn revealed himself to be Magneto. He had been hiding in the school for some time, planting the seeds of terrorism and dealing Kick right under Professor X's nose. He took the X-Men out of commission, crippled and captured Professor X and destroyed the Institute. He then went to New York City, taking the Special Class with him. Together with Toad and Esme, who had been conspiring with Magneto all along, the Special Class became the new Brotherhood of Mutants. 
Magneto proceeded to wreak havoc and destruction on New York. After sending the city's superheroes off on a wild goose chase, he formed a magnetic shield around Manhattan, effectively closing it off from the outside world. He renamed the city New Genosha, after the island nation he had once ruled. Many mutants gathered to him, and he directed them to herd all the humans they could find into crematoria. At this time, the Special Class began to rebel against Magneto's extremist acts. Beak, in particular, protested strongly against the humans being systematically exterminated. Magneto, in a fit of anger, accidentally killed Basilisk. He then ordered Beak to be thrown in with the humans. Beak escaped from the levitated cars and succeeded in flying for a few seconds before crashing several stories to the ground. The injured and wounded Barnell was further beaten up by a group of mutant bullies when he tried to identify himself as one of Professor X's students.
Beak was found by E.V.A., the nervous system of Weapon Thirteen (a.k.a. Fantomex), who took him to the hideout of an underground resistance. There, Beak was tended to by Phoebe of the Stepford Cuckoos, who informed him that Esme had been controlling Martha into influencing the Special Class students' minds. Beak found Cyclops and Fantomex in the hideout and told them everything he knew about Magneto's plans. When the X-Men launched an attack on Magneto, Beak went with them to try to rescue Angel and his kids. After Magneto was defeated, Beak and the Special Class returned to the school. He and his family then moved into a small house separate from the student dormitories. [New X-Men #146-150] |
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