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Beast Boy

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/titans_united_vol_1_3_textless_variantjpg.jpg

Alter Ego: Garfield Logan

Abilities: Animal shapeshifting

First Appearance: Doom Patrol #99 (November 1965)

Beast Boy, also known as Changeling and Menagerie, is a DC Comics superhero created by Arnold Drake and Bob Brown, first appearing in the November 1965 issue of The Doom Patrol. As a child, Garfield Logan survived an infectious green monkey bite through the Super Science of his parents, who were in Africa studying the field of reverse evolution. Their treatment saved his life, but had two distinct effects—first, Garfield would spend the rest of his days as green as the monkey that bit him, and second, he had developed the ability to turn into any animal at will.

By the time of his appearance in the pages of Doom Patrol, Garfield had become a Rebellious Spirit, chafing under the shackles of his abusive guardian, whom he had been collected by following the death of his parents. Following a number of adventures and misadventures alike with the Doom Patrol, he was adopted by Steve Dayton (Mento) and Rita Farr (Elasti-Girl), which resulted in a happy period of time in his life until the Patrol was murdered, ending his series of origin.

However, Garfield is most famous for his appearances with the Teen Titans. Following a couple of brief appearances with the early Teen Titans, first as a Special Guest in the early 60s issues and then as a member of Titans West, Gar was fully initiated into the New Teen Titans at the very start of the seminal Wolfman and Perez run, taking his place as an iconic member of the team roster, with an almost uninterrupted tenure since, barring some turbulence around the Turn of the Millennium and his run with The Ravagers in the New 52.

Beast Boy has appeared in several television adaptations, including Teen Titans (2003), Young Justice (2010), and Titans (2018).


Beast Boy provides examples of:

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    A-H 
  • Aborted Arc:
    • In the original Doom Patrol issues, Gar was carrying around a key to his parents' legacy, but any future explorations of that legacy were largely cut short with the death of the original Doom Patrol. By the time he joined the New Teen Titans, this appears to have been completely forgotten.
    • During the set up for the Titans LA project, Gar moved to Hollywood area and reconnected with Bette "Flamebird" Kane, another Titans West alumnus, but the project ultimately failed to go forward.
    • The original Doom Patrol had a backup feature in the later issues expanding his past, which was dropped after issue 115 and left unresolved right before getting to how Nicholas Galtry found and obtained custody of him.
  • Abusive Parents:
    • Nicholas Galtry, his abusive guardian before his Doom Patrol enlistment. Galtry was the Logan family attorney who became Garfield's court-appointed guardian to gain access to the kid's massive inheritance and spend it for his own ends, from covering bad investments to hiring assassins to kill Garfield for finding out. He actually conspired with the Brotherhood of Evil for a time and when that failed to kill Gar, he finally decides to take matters into his own hands and kill him personally, with his increasingly murderous resentment inadvertently forming its own Character Development arc. Bonus points for being retconned into Garfield's maternal uncle by the DC website.
    • Downplayed with Steve Dayton during the New Teen Titans, who would occasionally lash out at Garfield in the midst of his own trauma and breakdowns. There were periods of peace and even mutual love between them, however, but the writers kept driving Dayton Ax-Crazy.
  • Adopting the Abused: After he was orphaned, Beast Boy lived under the care of his abusive guardian Nicholas Galtry before Elasti-Girl and Mento eventually adopted him as their son.
  • Afraid of Doctors: In the Geoff Johns run, Beast Boy has a phobia of doctors, due to being experimented on as a kid and in particular has a special hatred for needles.
  • Almighty Janitor: At least one interpretation of Beast Boy's character is that he has immense power (see Inverse Law of Complexity to Power below) but doesn't want the responsibility involved.
  • Alternate Company Equivalent: Downplayed when drawn by Nicola Scott during the J.T. Krul run, where Beast Boy both looked and acted similarly to Beast of the X-Men —both are Older and Wiser Mentor Archetypes with a form somewhere between man and animal and prone to striking a Primal Stance.
  • Amazing Technicolor Population:
    • Gar's classic green skin was a leftover from the Emergency Transformation his parents subjected him to to save his life in his Superhero Origin.
    • When he appeared in The Ravagers of the New 52, he was revamped and given a Palette Swap to red to highlight his new connection to the Red, the metaphysical manifestation of the animal kingdom. Once The Ravagers series was cancelled, he was shuttled over to the Teen Titans and his green skin was quietly restored for the 2014 Teen Titans series.
  • Ambiguously Human: While it's a common shorthand to describe him as an X-Men-style mutant, it's hard to tell whether he's even really human at all anymore, given his DNA is completely mutable.
  • Animorphism: He can turn into a green version of any animal (though he can't turn into larger animals without strain) and can speak in any form. This is because he's not limited to turning into animals, are included magical and mythological monsters.
  • Archnemesis Dad: Zigzagged with Gar's adoptive father Steve Dayton during Wolfman's run, where he got caught by the helmet in the Heel–Face Revolving Door. Dayton just couldn't go for more than a few years without going Ax-Crazy.
  • Art Evolution: How Beast Boy's powers manifested wasn't immediately settled at first. When he first showed up, he could turn into any animal almost perfectly except for his head, which stayed green and retained a few human features. It wasn't until later that he started turning into complete (and completely green) animals.
  • The Artifact: His red-and-white uniforms are holdovers from the original Doom Patrol of the sixties; he continues to wear the colors even decades after the crew was brought back from the dead and the "team uniform" was retired.
  • Artistic License – Biology: Gar can turn into animals of nearly any kind, but whether or not those animals are accurate representations is a different story. Some of his stronger animal forms show cases of Super-Strength, while his bird forms in flight are capable of keeping up with high-speed Flying Bricks.
  • Artistic License – Physics: Occasionally Gar's animal morphs, while naturally strong animals, are shown exhibiting levels of strength and durability beyond even their natural capacities.
  • Attention Whore: Gar's been a sucker for attention, especially from pretty girls, since The New Teen Titans, and admits in early in Teen Titans Volume 3 that the positive attention is a significant reason behind his heroism. It comes up again post-Rebirth, where he admits he feels the need to have attention on him.
  • Bad Future:
    • In the world of Kingdom Come, Garfield has lost his ability to maintain his human shape or turn into normal animals, and is instead forced to take the shape of a gargoyle and only turn into imaginary creaturesnote .
    • In the "Titans Tomorrow" storyline, Gar encounters a nearly feral future self named Animal Man.
    • He survives a Zombie Apocalypse to show up in the Rotworld crossover.
    • He's also one of the last few superheroes left in the Forever Evil (2013) tie-in, now using the moniker Beast Man, with his wife Rose Wilson and their daughternote .
    • Killed off in the Injustice: Gods Among Us timeline via a nuke.
    • Beast Boy appears in the Doom Patrol "Weight of the Worlds" storyline, having been trapped in chimpanzee form.
  • Barrier Maiden: On a couple of occasions, Beast Boy has been targeted by villains as a stepping stone to another dimension.
    • In Titans Vol. 2, Beast Boy was described as the "key" to a portal Trigon's sons were attempting to open to Trigon's realm; more specifically they wanted leftover power from the Trigon Seeds still lingering in his body.
    • In The Ravagers, Beast Boy's new connection to the Red makes him a target for the forces of both Harvest and Brother Blood, who are trying to get to the Red for their own devices.
  • The Berserker: After being empowered by the Source energy he has to be careful not to be overwhelmed by his animal instincts and go feral.
  • Beast Man: Due to the fallout of Justice League: No Justice, his Shape Shifter Default Form has mutated into a heftier, more brutal form; while he can return to his human shape, it takes a conscious effort. He's restored to normal after the events of Into the Bleed.
  • Best Friend: Beast Boy and Cyborg were nearly always shoulder-to-shoulder in the days of the New Teen Titans, but their friendship began to disappear in the decades following and was completely lost after the New 52, when Cyborg was fully promoted to the Justice League and Beast Boy joined the Ravagers.
  • Beware the Nice Ones / Beware the Silly Ones: He's such a good-natured goofball that you almost forget that he can change into any number of things that can and will kill people. At one time, he turned himself into a poisonous spider, bit a foe, and said that the foe had a choice; give himself up to the authorities who could give him a cure, or run and die. That being said, it takes a lot for him to get truly dangerous.
  • Big Brother Mentor:
    • Zigzagged with Cyborg during the days of the New Teen Titans. Beast Boy was essential to helping Victor get his sea-legs in the brave new world of superheroics, guiding him through his angst about being different—Victor, meanwhile, being more emotionally stable and secure, helped Beast Boy through problems of his own and helped keep him focused.
    • Gar was the rather spurious semi-responsible sort during volume one of Titans, in which he and Bette Kane, the two-man Titans West team, did some mentoring of the DEOrphans and even led them on at least one mission while they were ostensibly "babysitting" them.
    • More officially, Gar joined Kory and Cyborg as the mentors of the Core Four Young Justice transplants in Teen Titans Volume 3, where he did a generally better job.
    • He returned to the title during J. T. Krul's run as an Older and Wiser senior member on the team, fulfilling much of the same role.
  • Birds of a Feather: With Raven in the New 52 Teen Titans.
  • Boxing Lessons for Superman: One of the "limitations" of Beast Boy's power some writers employ is the fact that he simply doesn't know what he can do. Just watching Animal Planet allows him to discover new animal forms and the inherent powers they possess.
  • Brainwashed and Crazy: Every time Dark Raven comes into a storyline, Beast Boy winds up hypnotized into becoming her henchman.
  • Brilliant, but Lazy: Downplayed in the New Teen Titans, where Garfield has an aptitude for learning when motivated (access to the best tutors money can buy doesn't hurt).
  • Bullying a Dragon: In the days before he joined the Doom Patrol, Gar was on the receiving end of routine mockery over his green coloration from schoolmates who had no idea he could do something like turn into a wolf.
  • The Cameo: Garfield Logan was largely glossed over when Secret Origins Volume 2 was detailing the DC Universe's new Post-Crisis backstories, both in stories about the Teen Titans and the annual dedicated to the Doom Patrol, but he appears in the final issue as the surprise narrator of the chapter shared by The Flashes, Barry Allen and Jay Garrick.
  • Casanova Wannabe: It's rare, but he can occasionally come on way too strong when he flirts with girls, ranging directly into sexual harassment.
  • Character Catchphrase: It's Garfield who introduces the famous "Titans Together!" rallying cry to the franchise lexicon during The Judas Contract.
  • Characterization Marches On: The original Doom Patrol Beast Boy was a dyed-in-the-wool Rebellious Spirit. New Teen Titans Beast Boy was a Sad Clown. Modern incarnations (read: those following the famous Teen Titans cartoon) tend to go for the immature goofball who can turn into feral animals.
  • Chick Magnet: Between his multiple romances and his moderate celebrity, Beast Boy tends to have little problem with attracting women.
  • Code Name: Gar's had several code names over the years. While he started (and is typically known) as "Beast Boy", he became "Changeling" after he became a New Teen Titan; this was later undone by DC when Geoff Johns wrote his miniseries in the oughts (Johns himself only referred to the character as "Garfield" or "Gar"). Sometimes he goes by "the Beast-Boy" or "the Changeling". In Kingdom Come, he instead goes by Menagerie.
  • Collector of Forms: Beast Boy can only transform into animals he has seen, which can include extinct animals and alien animals.
  • Combo Platter Powers: While his main power is shapeshifting (see Inverse Law of Complexity to Power below), he also has, in no particular order, super strength, super speed, super senses, an advanced Healing Factor, and the ability to use Mento's psionic helmet... which can only be used by people with inherent psychic abilities. However, these secondary powers receive very little attention, so little that some writers up and forget they exist.
  • Comicbook Time: Beast Boy debuted as a teenager in 1965, where it was made quite clear that he had a substantial inheritance to receive upon is 21st birthday. He made it all the way to Flashpoint without turning 21; poor guy.
  • Compressed Adaptation: When Beast Boy shows up in a Teen Titans adaptation, his main role will likely be comic relief. His Dark and Troubled Past will be summarily ignored in favor of him being silly and making jokes (and usually lousy ones at that) — a Sad Clown without the Sad; even the 2003 cartoon didn't bother with the Doom Patrol until they hit the Post-Script Season, while Teen Titans Go! took until the sixth season to acknowledge his history with the Doom Patrol.
  • Cool Mask: In order to hide his identity when he originally ran with the Doom Patrol, Gar had to disguise his face with a mask... but Depending on the Artist things like the color scheme and whether the mask was Form Fitting Clothing were constantly in flux, so there are several possible versions of Beast Boy's "classic" mask, ranging from a yellow Domino Mask to a purple-and-black complete head covering.
  • Crossover: He appears in the final issue of Captain Carrot and His Amazing Zoo Crew chasing down Gorilla Grodd from their home dimension. Remarkably, this adventure was part of the setup for The Oz-Wonderland War.
  • Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass: Despite his goofy persona, even as early as New Teen Titans, Garfield could be secretly great in a fight. During a sparring match with Terra in the lead-up to The Judas Contract, Gar easily penetrates her defenses again and again and frustrates her so badly that she has a Freak Out.
  • Curtains Match the Window: He has green hair and eyes.
  • Dark and Troubled Past: During the pre-Flashpoint era.
    • Gar's Superhero Origin is rife with trauma, like nearly dying from an infected monkey bite, helplessly watching his parents fall to their deaths, and accidentally tricking the men who later kidnapped him into murdering each other. By the time he appears in Doom Patrol, he's become the ward of his family's abusive lawyer Galtry, who's squandered millions of dollars from Gar's inheritance and tried to cover his tracks by subjecting Garfield to repeat Assassination Attempts.
    • By the time he appears in the New Teen Titans, he'd also collected a few more miseries, including the death of the Doom Patrol and a poor acting career.
  • A Darker Me: Following his betrayal and torture at the hands of the reborn Brotherhood of Evil in the nineties, the resulting trauma turned Gar's shapeshifting into a Lovecraftian Superpower rife with Body Horror. While he mostly restricted himself to being a Terror Hero, he enjoyed the change so much he even went so far as to start wearing a pitch-black longcoat over his superhero duds. Things naturally went From Bad to Worse after he was abducted by Evil Raven II.
  • A Day in the Limelight: Geoff Johns penned the Beast Boy miniseries in 2000, and then the Beast Boys and Girls arc in 2004. The first took place while he was trying to break back into acting after declining to join the resurrected Titans group and getting, and the second featured him being temporarily stripped of his powers even as they were infecting all the children in the city.
  • Deadpan Snarker: Comes with the territory of You Fight Like a Cow.
  • Deal with the Devil: Issues 14-15 of The New Teen Titans volume one had him forced to promise the Brotherhood of Evil that they'd be free to go for now in exchange for helping them stop Madame Rouge.
  • Deceased Parents Are the Best: During the events of NTT Gar angsts on occasion about the demise of his birth parents and when he's not, he angsts about the death of Elasti-girl and the Doom Patrol. Technically Mento was still alive, but he'd been psychically tortured and spent the nineties as a supervillain called Crimelord.
  • Demonic Possession: There have been a couple of occasions over the years where Gar has been under the influence of some evil spirit, which transformed him into a physical version of themselves or some other monstrosity.
    • Gar is kidnapped by Evil Raven II at the beginning of Arsenal's original stint as team leader and infested with the equivalent of ten Trigon Seeds.
    • Gar is possessed by the spirit of a Tengu during a trip to Japan.
  • Depending on the Artist:
    • The particulars of his face-mask from the Doom Patrol era could vary surprisingly widely in color scheme and design.
    • With the success of the animated cartoon, the question of how animalistic he looks (with features like Pointed Ears and Cute Little Fangs, clawed hands and bare feet, or slitted rather than round pupils) now varies with each artist who draws him. How old he looks is also frequently changed, oftentimes looking as young as Bart rather then his actual age. Nicola Scott's depiction of Gar from just prior to Flashpoint is very close to the Beast and Wolverine of the X-Men.
  • Depending on the Writer: Following Wolfman's run on the New Teen Titans, which cast him as a Sad Clown and Chivalrous Pervert, Gar's been pulled in many different directions.
    • Despite setting out on his own in the margins of the first Titans volume due to the work of Devin Grayson and Geoff Johns, the Titans LA teamnote  collapsed and Gar resurfaced as the Big Brother Mentor of Teen Titans vol. 3, also under Johns, who quietly de-aged him after deciding the title had too many non-teenagers.
    • Several writers, Johns included, have heavily exaggerated his Casanova Wannabe traits into physically harassing women with his shapeshifting powers or making him a not-so-Chivalrous Pervert.
    • The success of the cartoon also increased his tendency to be depicted as a Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass to the point of making him an immature prat.
    • Pat McCallum, who wrote one of Gar's last appearances in the 2008 Titans series (in which he decides to migrate over to the Teen Titans series), resurrected his Sad Clown trait to deconstruct it and highlight Gar's Hidden Depths, and set up a chance at a mentorship role, only for Felicia Henderson (who received him in her run on Teen Titans) to depict him as a clownish variant of The Münchausen who immediately insisted on his own leadership and fawned desperately over Raven.
    • J. T. Krul recast him as the team's Big Brother Mentor once again, but with an extra helping of Older and Wiser and almost no clownish elements at all, taking a backseat to guide rather than lead the team.
  • Dude, Where's My Respect?: A recurring element of Devin Grayson's run on the series, starting with the JLA/Titans crossover.
    • In the crossover, no matter how obviously essential Gar is to the plot as the mentally disturbed Big Bad's best friend and how willing he is to participate, he is routinely ignored by Superman, Batman, and even other Titans (he takes offense when Raven mentions but fails to include him in the conversation).
    • In the Secret Files attachment to The Titans, the Fab Five invite personal nominees for membership in the revived team; Gar, despite helping them reach out to their nominees, doesn't make the list. Roy awkwardly claims the Titans can squeeze him in, Cyborg insists that Gar tag along, but when Nightwing offers to include him, Gar doesn't take to being the team's third wheel and declines, instead heading off to Hollywood to try his hand at an acting career.
  • The Dragon: To Evil Raven II in the mid-nineties, after she infested him with a combined ten Trigon Seeds (out of a total of one hundred); during this period, he was the servant with the most loyalty to her and received the most fondness in turn. Eventually, he became the hideous "Gar-Goyle".
  • Early-Installment Weirdness: His animal transformations were originally depicted as having him turn into normally-colored animals except for the head being colored green with green hair like his normal self as opposed to the more accepted fully-green animals.
  • Earn Your Happy Ending: Garfield's Superhero Origin was sufficiently traumatic that simply being accepted into the Doom Patrol and especially adopted by Rita and Steve counts. This was given a prompt Happy Ending Override by the death of the Silver Age Doom Patrol at the end of the original run.
  • Emergency Transformation: In his Superhero Origin, Garfield was bitten by a green monkey and contracted Sakutia, a disease the monkey was a carrier for. His desperate parents gave him an experimental treatment consisting of a serum and a peculiar green raynote  to morph him into the same species of monkey so he could survive, but when they changed him back he kept his green skin.
  • Empty Shell: The risk for him turning into The Swarm is that if enough of him dies, when he returns to human form he will be left a vacant living corpse.
  • Enemy Mine: In the New Teen Titans, Garfield strikes a bargain with the Brotherhood of Evil to hunt down the renegade Madame Rouge and Captain Zahl, who killed the original Doom Patrol.
  • Establishing Character Moment:
    • Way back in '65, he invaded Doom Patrol headquarters and ransacked everything (up to and including defacing a picture of Elasti-girl and putting an axe through one of Robotman's spare head units), came back the next night and got caught only when the Doom Patrol successfully ganged up on him. When they finally let the teenage punk out, he immediately started bellowing at them for messing up his hair and shoes and started another fight, hurling insults in every direction. He then had the gall to demand they let him on the team. The Doom Patrol hated his guts, but the fans loved him, and he's been around for more than fifty years since.
    • When Everyone Meets Everyone at the start of the New Teen Titans, Donna Troy is startled to discover a walking, talking, bright green bulldog has approached. The bulldog promptly leaps into her arms and turns into a human—Changeling—while she's still carrying him.
  • Evil Makes You Monstrous:
    • A variant; Gar's transformations become more monstrous as he gets angrier. When he suffers Uncontrollable Rage, he effectively goes One-Winged Angel.
    • The Brotherhood of Evil got ahold of him and subjected him to torture, leaving him stuck turning only into monsters for a time back in the nineties.
    • During one of Raven's evil stints, she implanted a seed of Trigon in him, turning him evil and, unsurprisingly, forcing him to turn into demonic creatures.
  • Evil Stole My Faith: In Teen Titans (New 52), he confides in Bunker that he is an atheist because the amount of deaths he's witnessed makes him strongly doubt that there can be a God.
  • Face–Monster Turn: Gar's been saddled with more than his fair share of this trope over the years, being a frequent victim of Demonic Possession, Psycho Serum, or Brainwashed and Crazy, causing him to turn into monsters and fight against his friends and allies. (Literally his first Teen Titans adventure involved him being hypnotized into serving the villain and turning into a gorilla-snake chimaera to fight the Titans).
  • Famous Ancestor: Gar Logan's parents, and in particular his father, was a famous inventor and luminary of the scientific community—Niles Caulder confesses that he knew Gar's father in the past when they first meet.
  • Flanderization:
    • Gar's character development in his own 2000 mini-series began receding over the course of the following decade until he was at best a Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass, but really just a moron.
    • After "Graduation Day", a few stories featured Gar's flirtations progressing into physical harassment until Koriand'r would come to blast him away.
    • Felcia Henderson's run on Teen Titans Volume Three features this from the start, with Gar clownishly declaring himself leader of the team to the annoyance of everyone else and fawning over Raven. The disdain for him from the rest of the team is palpable.
  • Eye Scream: In the wake of "Dark Crisis", Beast Boy is shot through the eye by Deathstroke and put into a coma. Upon waking up he has an Eyepatch of Power mirroring Deathstroke's own.
  • Fusion Dance: Gar has been fused with both Klarion the Witch Boy in a Valentine's Day Special and Cyborg in Titans Academy, both times putting friction in his romance with Raven due to Sharing a Body.
  • For the Funnyz: Gar is almost constantly wisecracking, even when it annoys his teammates. According to New Teen Titans, he does it to keep his head from "blowing up from depression".
  • Greaser Delinquents: Downplayed; classic Doom Patrol Beast Boy has the slicked hair, the jacket, and the attitude. Kid was every inch the young rebel.
  • The Grinch: In the 2009 holiday special, The (Beast) Boy who Hated Christmas!note . Beast Boy hates Christmas because, while everybody else is having fun and enjoying all the conventional pleasures of the season, he gets to spend his holiday doing hours of menial labor for his abusive guardian Nick Galtry, cleaning his dingy, ratty motel room. Luckily, Elasti-girl hates Christmas, too.
  • Hand Wave:
    • Where does Beast Boy's uniform go when he transforms into animals? The writers haven't really bothered to explain it. In the original Doom Patrol stories, his clothes actually don't disappear but are hidden by "emanations from his body". Decades later, Wally West revealed he could tell where the uniform disappeared to and used it as leverage to shut Gar up while he was cracking wise about Gorilla Grodd.
    • How does Gar manage to talk normally even while in animal form? Heck if the writers know... but you could justify it if you factor in his psychic powers.
  • Happy Ending Override:
    • Gar gets adopted by Rita and Steve in the sixties? The Doom Patrol is murdered by General Zahl.
    • Gar finally finds and rescues his long-lost adoptive dad Steve Dayton with the Titans? The side-effects from using the Mento helmet and a misadventure with John Constantine drive Steve Ax-Crazy.
    • Gar finally starts getting along with Steve out of shared love for Rita? Steve goes mad (again) and tries to kill him.
    • Gar finally resumes a relationship with Raven at the end of the Post-Crisis Titans? Flashpoint happens.
  • Has a Type: While Beast Boy and Raven have been a Fan-Preferred Couple since the 2003 cartoon, in the comics his first two girlfriends were blonde and blue-eyed: sweetheart Jillian Jackson and the ill-fated Tara Markov. He's also very close with Bette "Flamebird" Kane, another blonde. Teen Titans Rebirth gives him a close relationship with the blonde leader of Nevrland, Joran. It's even lampshaded at the end of the 2000 Beast Boy miniseries:
    Bette: You can't resist a cute blonde and a smile.
    Gar: Never could, Bette. Never could.
  • The Heart: A genuinely nice, compassionate guy who hides the pain with a lot of bad jokes to cheer up his Blessed with Suck teammates. If you need someone to pull a "I Know You're in There Somewhere" Fight, send Gar. The fact that it didn't work with comic book Terra was what cemented her as irredeemable. It's also why giving him a very unpleasant fate is shorthand for a timeline gone wrong.
  • Heterosexual Life-Partners: With pre-Flashpoint Cyborg. Cyborg is often bitter at what he frequently sees as the loss of part of his humanity, but Beast Boy can always cheer him up. Conversely, when Beast Boy hits a few too many points on the dingbat meter, Cyborg can bring him down to earth.
  • Hidden Depths:
    • Gar had many of them in Wolfman's New Teen Titans.
      • It was a recurring theme that Garfield was a Sad Clown—constantly making jokes, lame or otherwise, in order to keep his head "from blowing up from depression."
      • Garfield also proved to be Brilliant, but Lazy when he belatedly hired a tutor to teach him sign-language to speak with Jericho; "belatedly" because most if not all of the other Titans were already fluent in it.
      • Garfield planned and staged Donna Troy's wedding just about single-handedly and proved to be more tasteful and thoughtful than anyone expected.
    • Beast Boy's knowledge of animals comes with a lot of niche applications that only he knows about. In Rebirth, when the Team was caring for Jackson's mother, he morphed into maggots to remove the decaying flesh and use their secretions to stimulate recovery.
  • Hide Your Otherness:
    • Downplayed; for a guy with green skin and hair, there's only so much otherness you can hide, but one interpretation of why he doesn't use the full extent of his powers is that he's ashamed of them for being freakish.
    • In the Silver Age Doom Patrol Garfield refused to display his powers publicly because he'd promised his late father he would keep them secret as a child. He naturally pays for this by having to endure Bullying a Dragon from other students who mock him for his green skin.
  • Hunk: Gar boasts a significant amount of chest and arm hair whenever he gets a shirtless scene.

    I-Z 
  • I Didn't Mean to Kill Him: Madame Rouge and General Zahl, villains from the Doom Patrol, were responsible for killing the eponymous heroes of that series, and survived long enough for Gar Logan to catch up to them, with all his Unstoppable Rage in tow. At long last Gar finally catches Rouge and lethally wounds her, only to instantly regret it.
  • I Just Want to Be Special: He is very attached to his super powers, and has had them since he was too small to know anything different. Changing into any critter he can think of? That's not just useful, it's a lot of fun.
  • In-Universe Nickname: "Gar" from Garfield, on occasion.
  • Inverse Law of Complexity to Power: Garfield's power is "shapeshifting into animals", taking on both their form and natural powers. The range, mechanism, and limitations of his power have never, in the fifty years since his debut, been really examined, leading to what is basically one of the most versatile movesets in all of DC.
    • Typically he shifts into some species of earth fauna, but he's also turned (or is capable of turning) into:
      • Multiple animals at oncenote .
      • Things that aren't strictly speaking animalsnote .
      • Chimerical Mix-and-Match Crittersnote .
      • Both variants of Animals Not to Scalenote .
      • Prehistoric Monstersnote .
      • Imaginary creaturesnote .
      • Alien speciesnote .
      • Mythical beastsnote .
      • Eldritch Abominationsnote .
      • "Fictional" creaturesnote .
      • Funny Animalsnote .
      • Beast Mennote .
    • His Animal Man self from the Titans Tomorrow arc is able to duplicate his animal morphs in a process that looks suspiciously like cellular replication, but it's unknown whether he can transform into microscopic life forms in the post-crisis world (he could in Doom Patrol Volume 1).
  • Karmic Trickster: When he served with the original Doom Patrol, Garfield was not at all above using his abilities to humiliate and frustrate bullies and jerks at school; at one point he challenged a Jerk Jock to a race and used his rabbit morph to repeatedly get the drop on him. By the end of the race, the jock had been reduced to Tantrum Throwing and Inelegant Blubbering.
  • Kid-Appeal Character: During his original stint on the Doom Patrol, being the token teen with attitude.
  • King Incognito: Downplayed. In his Superhero Origin, King Tawaba of Upper Lamumba briefly took Garfield as his son after the Logans died, but the kid rejected a life of rules and study and instead became a Wild Child living on the outskirts of the village in a treehouse with a chimp named Meka. Tawaba let this stand but promised to forever consider him his son and friend... which would imply Garfield is still an African prince.
  • The Lady's Favour: During the events of Who Is Wonder Girl?, Garfield volunteers to go on a suicide mission to seek out the lost Cyborg and Nightwing under the Big Bad's nose. While he jokes through the discussion and fully expects to be teased for his first attempt at turning into an alien beast for the job, his bravery earns him a kiss from Donna, a kiss from Kory, and a "psychic whammo" from Ravennote  that he describes as even better than kisses.
    Garfield: Rave — I think I'm in love.
  • The Leader:
    • In his Superhero Origin, he encountered an evil plot by Nazis to create an army of gorilla soldiers. Gar broke it up by turning himself into a green gorilla, and, under his leadership, they Turned Against Their Masters.
    • Subverted at the Turn of the Millennium, where some setup was done to let Gar lead the Titans LA team, but this was ultimately never greenlit by DC, and so Gar and Bette Kane instead spent a few years orbiting the main action.
    • Beast Boy did lead the Titans during the Time Skip prior to One Year Later, but this was the most unstable period in post-crisis Titans history and by the time the story actually starts, Beast Boy has left the Titans himself to support the Doom Patrol, which is in dire straits.
    • During a Bad Future storyline in the first volume of the New 52 Teen Titans, Beast Man co-presides over the last few Titans with his wife Rose Wilson.
  • Like Father, Like Son: When Gar first meets Niles Caulder of the Doom Patrol, Caulder notes he has the same guts his father had.
  • Lonely Rich Kid: Downplayed. Rebirth's Teen Titans introduced him throwing a massive party with his uncle's money.
  • Lovable Sex Maniac: Under Marv Wolfmans' pen in The New Teen Titans, he threw himself at nearly anything female (his Bronze Age bios listed his relationship status as "desperate"). The second issue features him intentionally inviting the team to a Pool Scene just to trick Donna Troy and Starfire into the skimpiest bikinis he could find. That said, whenever he got out of hand, Donna Troy was usually there to put him in his place.
  • Master Actor: Zigzagged.
    • During the Titans West arc at the tail end of the 70s, Gar was introduced as the actor behind Lieutenant Tork of Space Trek, but during Tales of the New Teen Titans, Gar was indicated to be only mediocre with a doomed-from-the-start career, though he made Blatant Lies otherwise.
    • Later, Marv Wolfman decided against the original direction and began ascribing him some actual celebrity. Since then, Gar has been depicted as a fairly talented actor with legitimate celebrity and Space Trek has become the DC universe equivalent of Star Trek rather then the knockoff it was originally claimed to be.
  • Mentor Archetype: To Fast-Forward, Kid Slick, Fever, and Freak of Justice, Inc. during the third run of Doom Patrol under John Arcudi, helping ground them back in reality after their previous coach turned out to be an imaginary doppelganger.
  • Meat Versus Veggies: Not a Straw Vegetarian himself, but is been here and there across many stories and media. Gar has a point, since he knows what's to expect of the process of putting your ham & eggs on the table since... you know, he is all of your meals in a signle package. Also, he avoids to turn into carnivores (Depending on the Writer) as much as he can due the same issue.
  • Momma's Boy: Downplayed. Historically, Beast Boy has been closer to his mothers Marie and Rita then to his fathers Mark and Steve.
  • Next Tier Power-Up: He awakened the ability to shape shift into mythological and magical animals when protecting Raven from the Wyld. His evil future self who had the same ability implied that he could do it all along but was afraid to do so. In 90s era comics he would pull out dragons on occasion, but he was also under significant psychological strain at the time.
  • Not Allowed to Grow Up: Being one of the most famous Teen Titans has resulted in his portrayal as a perpetual teenager so he can stay stuck to the title, which is especially ironic in light of one of his earliest stories making a big to-do about his inheritance, promised to him at the age of 21. Having the epithet of Beast Boy probably doesn't help.
  • Older and Wiser: Krul's and Scott's run at the end of Teen Titans Volume Three sloughed off about a decade of Flanderization to allow him to serve as the Mentor Archetype to the Teen Titans.
  • One-Steve Limit: Garfield Logan is neither DC's first "Beast Boy" nor "Changeling".
    • The first "Beast Boy" was Ilshu Nor of the Heroes of Lallor (debut 1964), who had all the same powers, but underwent a Face–Heel Turn and Redemption Equals Death in short order after Gar's debut (1965).
    • There have been several Changelings in DC history, the earliest a The Flash villain from 1947. Of particular note is Gregor Nagy, an expy of Gar (a blonde teenager and the son of a biologist who gained the power of altering his species) who briefly became the adopted son of Superman until extreme use of his powers killed him. (For the record, Nagy could become Kryptonian).
  • Only Mostly Dead: Twice in New Teen Titans, both times by being shot and having to wait to be healed by either the Amazons or Raven.
  • Perfect Health: In the "Beast Boys and Girls" arc, he mentions that he hasn't been sick since he was six. His sickness is a plot point in the rest of the arc.
  • Phlebotinum Overdose: Following the No Justice Crisis Crossover, Beast Boy was infused with energy from the Source Wall that mutated him into a furry hulk and threatens to turn him into The Berserker if he loses focus.
  • Primal Stance: While he usually walks upright, it's not unheard of for him to get into poses similar to predators at rest or about to pounce.
  • Psychic Powers: During the fallout from the climax of The Judas Contract, Garfield launches a campaign against Deathstroke using Mento's helmet to manipulate everyone around him. Not only does the helmet require the user to have psychic powers to even work, Beast Boy's illusions were even able to outfox dedicated psychics like the Titans' own Lilith Clay.
  • Rebellious Spirit: During his original stint on the Doom Patrol, Beast Boy was the Teenager with Attitude. He would mouth off to basically anyone whose name wasn't Elasti-Girl (and even she wasn't spared Gar's mouthing off in his first story).
  • Red and Black and Evil All Over: His Evil Costume Switch after being infested with the Trigon Seed, which was a simple but effective Palette Swap of his old costume.
  • Refusal of the Call: Played with. At one point in the eighties, Dr. Fate invited Beast Boy (among others) to join him in creating a new Justice League (as the Martian Manhunter had disbanded the original). Not only did Beast Boy turn him down, he invited everyone in the group to join the Teen Titans, of which group he was already a member.
  • Required Secondary Powers:
    • Beast Boy only wears his uniform half of the time; it disappears whenever he shifts. Where, exactly, it goes (and the implications of it disappearing) are a puzzle that have yet to be solved.
    • Should his powers allow Beast Boy to turn into other humans? Wolfman and Perez say yes. Is he allowed to turn into other humans? Wolfman and Perez say no.
    • Beast Boy shifts into alien species like the Gordanians of the Vegan system, so can he become Kryptonian or Martian?
    • Given that he can turn into bacterial life forms, which are external to the Animalia kingdom, his powerset doesn't actually rule out transforming into plants or fungi. He just never does it, and perhaps it's never even occurred to the writers.
  • Reincarnation: Played with. An issue of Doom Patrol, Vol. 3 casts the then-current incarnation of the patrol as characters in the story of Nao Yut (or Nou Yu T'u), an ancient animorph warlord and emperor (a legend of the people of Ch'u) who was suckled by a tiger — Nao Yut was played by Beast Boy, natch.In the mask and everything!
    How much of that story is true?
    Not very much.
  • Relationship Revolving Door: Beast Boy and Raven have a very on again off again relationship, often spending their time apart pining for one another before getting back together again.
  • Resentful Guardian: Nicholas Galtry became his legal guardian after his parents died and has treated Garfield like crap while plotting to keep his inheritance to himself ever since. Part of why Beast Boy came to the Doom Patrol was to try and convince the heroes to save him from Galtry's abuse.
  • Ret-Canon: Following the One Year Later Time Skip from Infinite Crisis, Beast Boy donned his black-and-purple costume from the 2003 cartoon and was given pointy ears and fanged teeth to match his animated counterpart.
  • Ret-Gone:
    • John Byrne's run on Doom Patrol was a wholesale reboot of the series, which basically cost Beast Boy his adoptive mom and dad. The loss wasn't really paid any attention to until Infinite Crisis, when Beast Boy was there at Ground Zero for Superboy punching reality in half, leaving him and Rita Farr to deal with the fact that she was his mom again.
    • The New 52 rewrote Gar's entire history from scratch, doing away with his connection to the Doom Patrol entirely. Rebirth has yet to weigh in, but Gar did manage to cameo in Doom Patrol vol. 6 when one of its characters wears a shirt featuring his cartoon self from Teen Titans Go.
  • Sad Clown: His constant joking and goofing off are his way to distract himself from dwelling on tragedy. This is a character who got his start in Doom Patrol, after all.
  • Satellite Character:
    • Jillian "Jill" Jackson, who was introduced in Doom Patrol as the one girl who felt any sympathy for the high school outcast with green skin, became his Satellite Love Interest. Not quite enough to agree to date him, though (at least, not at first). Then New Teen Titans happened and her significance in Gar's life waned directly in proportion to Terra's growing presence.
    • Matt Logan is his paternal cousin, a goofy Loser Archetype and Bromantic Foil for Gar, from the pages of the Beast Boy miniseries. Matt has no ability to hold a job and has almost no sense of responsibility, all of which gives Gar something to snark internally over.
  • Savvy Guy, Energetic Girl: With Action Girl Bette "Flamebird" Kane in the Beast Boy miniseries, who took his sudden reappearance in Hollywood to mean the imminent resurrection of Titans West under the moniker "Titans LA" (but, as we know, the project was never greenlit).
  • Secret Identity: Beast Boy had a really awkward relationship with secret IDs back in the day. During his original stint on the Patrol, he wore a distinctive (and ridiculous) purple hood to disguise his equally distinctive green skin. The hood and the uniform served as a full body disguise, which worked well enough back in the day, but nowadays the hood is usually only a character footnote to be glanced over or poked fun at.
  • Secretly Wealthy: Mostly it's a secret because it's another facet of his character so rarely paid attention to. Remember, Garfield has a substantial inheritance in both estate and research (his biological father made millions with medical innovations before devoting his life to studying Reverse Evolution) and his adoptive father is Steve Dayton, the fifth richest man in the world. The Dayton estate makes Wayne Manor look like a pleasant little townhome.
  • Selective Obliviousness: In the The Judas Contract story, Changeling will always believe that Terra was The Mole or that she was being controlled by Slade, despite all the evidence of the contrary, including Terra's own explicit remarks.
  • Shapeshifter Default Form: For most of his history, Garfield's natural state was simply a green human with Teen Idol good looks, but the success of the cartoon lead new management to depict him as a Little Bit Beastly. In the Rebirth-era Titans title, following the events of Justice League: No Justice, Gar's post humanoid form is actually not his default, and he deforms into a hulking, furry creature when not concentrating.
  • Shipper on Deck: During his time with Justice, Inc., he quietly reveals he knows Kid Slick is interested in Fever, prompting Kid Slick to bluster that he's only concerned about her as a friend.
  • Shout-Out: One of Garfield's defining traits during Wolfman and Pérez's run is his tendency to make pop culture references. This is obvious from his first appearance, as he immediately proposes "Titans, assemble!" as the team's battle cry, though he then jokes that the phrase is already taken.
  • Sitcom Archnemesis: Danny Chase, with whom Changeling never got along.
  • Sixth Ranger: While Beast Boy served on the original Doom Patrol with his adoptive parents Mento and Elasti-girl, both Beast Boy and Mento served more as reserve forces to be called on when the main team was incapacitated in some way. They spent several missions at home, not getting along with each other.
  • Sole Survivor: If nothing else, Gar Logan is a survivor. He got to watch his parents go over a waterfall after a flood completely destroyed their African residence. He watched the crooks who kidnapped him shoot each other to death. For years, he was the only one who hadn't gone insane from the death of the Doom Patrol (until they found Robotman's Brain in a Jar was still functioning). In the New 52, he's the only member of the Ravagers to survive after the cancellation of their book.
  • Special Guest: Gar was almost one of the Fab Five, once upon a time. He appeared in an issue of the original Teen Titans, featuring just Robin, Kid Flash, Wonder Girl, and Aqua Lad — right after his debut in Doom Patrol, the Teen Titans writers considered whether they should bring him on (he was the second guest star after Speedy); the adventure was literally titled "The Fifth Titan". Notably, the Titans were actually quite welcoming, but couldn't accept him on the grounds that he needed Nick Galtry's permission, which, if you've been reading, you probably already figured wouldn't be forthcoming.note 
  • Still Wearing the Old Colors: Beast Boy's most common uniform colors—either his typical red and white or even the purple and black of Teen Titans (2003)—are lifted right from the Doom Patrol uniform. It never comes up, however, and mostly seems to be an artistic tradition at this point.

  • Storybreaker Power: Beast Boy is capable of turning into creatures as dangerous as the planetary conqueror "Starro" but refrains from doing so because of how easy it would be to lose himself to its power, when he does so in the "Beast World" event, he requires to shift into a whale first to increase his brain capacity to comprehend how difficult the shift will be and still requires Raven's empathic powers to keep his mind tethered to his humanity.
  • Super-Senses: A feature introduced during Johns' run (Teen Titans Volume 3) is that Gar has heightened senses even in his base form — early in the run, he could smell individuals on the roof of a hospital from the inside, and later on he could hear hypersonic signals emitting in Titans Tower from different floors than the source.
  • Super-Strength: After being empowered by the source energy, his new Beast Man form has strength enough to out-muscle Miss Martian and Donna Troy.
  • Survivor's Guilt: A major part of his Sad Clown status is that many of the people he's loved are dead, and he feels that crushing sense of responsibility common to superheroes.
    • In The Terror of Trigon, his evil double drives him over the edge by claiming he's personally responsible for murdering everyone he's ever loved and invites him to feed upon their corpses as a reward for all his hard work.
    • Rebirth era Beast Boy feels guilty over not being there for Tim Drake.
  • 10-Minute Retirement: During a Nightwing-led revival of the Titans around the Turn of the Millennium, Gar felt rather obviously put-out at being invited as an afterthought and declined. He moved to LA and tried to work on his acting career, though (after the Titans LA concept failed to lift-off at DC) he inevitably helped restore the Titans (yes, again, what, you think the Titans are stable?) with Cyborg and Starfire.
  • These Hands Have Killed: When he ended up killing Madame Rouge, he instantly regretted it.
  • Transplant:
    • Beast Boy started off with the Doom Patrol but eventually wound up in the New Teen Titans (after a stint on Titans West) when Raven summoned him to join the new team she was building. He ended up bringing the DP mythos with him, tethering the two series together for decades.
    • Subverted back in the sixties. As a matter of fact, Beast Boy had a run-in with the original Titans before they were even the Fab Five — he encountered Robin, Aqua Lad, Kid Flash, and Wonder Girl before Speedy had been retconned to become a founding member. Of course, he was still living with Nicholas Galtry at the time, who wouldn't give him permission to join either the Titans or the Doom Patrol, so he didn't get to enlist.
  • Traumatic Superpower Awakening: Downplayed. In his Superhero Origin, after he survived his infection and contracted permanent green skin, some time later his mother Marie Logan encountered a dangerous viper—Gar's response was to instinctively turn into a mongoose and kill it.
  • Troubled, but Cute: Handsome, loaded with an ugly past.
  • Undying Loyalty: He turned down an invitation to the Justice League once, affirming himself a "card-carrying member" of the Titans.
  • Unwitting Instigator of Doom: In a later episode of his Superhero Origin adventures in Africa after getting his powers, Gar was kidnapped by two criminals named Kurt and Stokes, who taught him how to break into a high-security vault to retrieve gold and diamonds. One night, Gar creates A Tragedy of Impulsiveness when he decides to play a trick and hide the stolen goods—his kidnappers immediately suspect the other of turning traitor and murder each other right in front of Gar.
  • Vague Age: Like most of the titans, it's hard to pinpoint an exact age, but Gar, who's been a teen for roughly fifty years (despite a few attempts to admit the cast were rightly in their twenties at this point) has a really bad case of it. NTT indicated him to be a younger member of the team, though he was treated as a peer of the original Silver Age Titans when he Guest Starred for them back in the sixties. And then there were the writers who wrote him like a kid even while they technically admitted him to be a Titans alumnus.
  • Vitriolic Best Buds: With Cyborg; at least, they were until the New 52 sent Vic off to join the Justice League and put Gar on the Ravagers.
  • West Coast Team:
    • Gar was a founding member of Titans West at the very tail-end of the Silver Age Teen Titans, along with Bat-Girl (Betty Kane), Lilith, Hawk, Dove, Golden Eagle, and Joker's Daughter.
    • Gar and Bette (now Flamebird) also tried to resurrect the team as Titans LA at the Turn of the Millennium, but (out of universe) the project was never greenlit and (in-universe) the effort collapsed.
  • Wild Child: For a short time after he was orphaned, he lived by himself in the wild.
  • Will They or Won't They?:
    • In the original Doom Patrol, Gar struggled to start up a relationship with his classmate Jillian Jackson, which ended in success. She vanished with the end of the first Doom Patrol run, but The New Teen Titans revived their relationship after The Judas Contract. Sadly, the events of the nineties, including the arrival of a second Tara Markov, ended up chasing Jill out for good.
    • Starting with Geoff Johns' run in Teen Titans Volume 3, Gar began developing a romance with Raven, who had just returned after a lengthy absence, and helping her reintegrate with the Titans. Once Johns left, though, the relationship took a hard turn for the rocky, with numerous arguments, break-ups, and brief get-togethers along the way. They finally reconciled just in time for Flashpoint to launch a company-wide Continuity Reboot.
  • Willfully Weak:
    • It is heavily implied multiple times that he restrains himself from shifting into magical and mythological creatures out of fear of losing control of himself. Fittingly since he killed his Trigon spawned Evil Twin when pushed too far by turning into an Eldritch Abomination and crushing him between his hands and Madame Rouge by accident when transformed into a chimera.
    • Even under normal circumstances Gar holds back a lot, considering the near infinite number of bone-crunchingly powerful or lethally toxic animals he can turn into with a mere thought.
  • You Don't Look Like You: He rather famously spent the first part of the New 52 dyed bright red, rather than his classic green hue, due to creators making a big deal of his connection to "The Red", which remained with him consistently through The Ravagers and the first Teen Titans series of the New 52. His color was quietly and inexplicably changed back to green with the start of the second Teen Titans series of there era.
  • You Fight Like a Cow: Gar's had this attitude for a long time, and the first people subjected to it were Cliff and Larry in the Doom Patrol.
  • Your Approval Fills Me with Shame: Is upset when Brain compliments his killing of Madame Rouge.


Alternative Title(s): Beast Boy

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