B’wana Beast Debuts On Legends Of Tomorrow

On tonight’s episode of DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, Billy Zane plays P.T. Barnum, the ringleader of the Greatest Show on Earth…and he’s got a very familiar right-hand man in the form of B’Wana Beast.

…not that you were supposed to notice, apparently.

“You’re good,” executive producer Phil Klemmer told us when we asked about the cameo. “We thought we hid him well enough that people wouldn’t notice.”

B’Wana Beast, who makes his live-action debut on tonight’s episode, is an obscure DC superhero, whose costume and powers passed to Freedom Beast after he retired.

In the original comics, Mike Maxwell as a trust-fund kid who turned down his fortune to do good deeds in the African jungles, only to be granted powers when his plane was struck by lightning and crashed not far from Vixen’s fictional homeland of Zambezi. He had a helmet and an elixir, both of which gave him powers and abilities.

His helmet allowed him limited mental contact with animals, giving him the ability to control them but also to feel empathy for their plight. The elixir gave him superhuman strength, endurance, and agility, as well as the ability to merge the body parts of animals to create chimaera, unique and monstrous beings that would serve him.

B’wana Beast was created by Bob Haney and Mike Sekowsky, and first appeared in 1967’s Showcase #66. While he has primarily appeared in Animal Man comics over the years, he has also had ties to the Global Guardians and Justice League International. Between his power set and ties to Zambezi, there is an assumption that he shares common powers with Vixen.

Even in the Silver Age, though, B’Wana Beast never existed in the 1870s, the stated time period for this episode of Legends. It seems likely, therefore, that Maxwell is not the Beast at this point, and that if anything the costume simply pre-dates his activities as a hero. Here, too, the man in the B’Wana Beast costume is not named but appears to be simply a part of Barnum’s traveling freakshow and provides a bit of hired muscle for Barnum when needed.