I thought the Beast was blue?

Seeing the beast in his original conception was alarming. He wasn't the suave intellectual, blue Hank McCoy I expected. He was crass, all up in Jean's mug and most obviously not blue. The beast in his current form is the raw animalistic instinct paired with a pure desire for the pursuit of wisdom and understanding. A perfect concoction that needed time to be realized. It brings up the question: How finalized are characters when they are first introduced? Characters often take a shape of their own  like the beast becoming intellectual, or the campy batman gradually becoming tortured and dark. Comic book creators must be careful when setting up the backstory of their heroes when the contours of their characters are just beginning to be outlined. Do comics need a good excuse for the change in character, like in X-Men they simply said that Beasts mutation was still occurring, or can they scrap the past like in batman and invent an entirely new reason for his decision to become batman. (I think it was originally because a bat flew into his office window.) I don't think many of the characters had a backstory in the first issue of X-Men. It didn't seem like Magneto and the prof were old friends in X-Men #1, and Stan didn't reveal anything about the team's individual past. I don't know if the decision to not include backstory was careful so the characters could develop into themselves, or if Stan just needed an explosion of action to seduce the innocent readers. It's interesting to see that the characters slowly develop until they are cemented into the lore we cherish, and even then, there is still room for them to grow.