"God Loves Man Kills" Finale

Welcome back Muties!  In this installment we'll be wrapping up my coverage of the seminal graphic novel "God Loves Man Kills", from 1982 by writer Chris Claremont and artist Brent Anderson. In our previous installments we we're introduced to Reverend William Stryker, anti-mutant-rights activist and founder of the tremendously profitable and influencial Stryker Crusade televangelist ministry. The Purifiers, the violent anti-mutant paramilitary force founded and funded by Stryker, attack and abduct Professor Charles Xavier, along with the X-Men Storm and Cyclops, faking their deaths in a car explosion. Cyclops and Storm are tortured in Stryker's secret lab, while Xavier is brainwashed into being Stryker's willing disciple. The Purifiers, meanwhile, also capture Xavier's student Illyana Rasputin and nearly capture X-Man Kitty Pryde, though the latter leads them on a desperate cat and mouse game though the streets and subway tunnels of Manhattan. Kitty is eventually rescued but the remaining X-Men - Wolverine, Colossus, and Nightcrawler - as well as their frequent antagonist Magneto. The X-Men and Magneto interrogate a number of Purifier soldiers and Stryker's torturer to learn the location of their captured comrades. Though unable to get deep enough into Stryker's building to get to Xavier, they rescue Scott and Ororo, and regroup for their next move.

As Chapter Four opens, Stryker is preparing to give a highly televised sermon at Madison Square Garden. One reporter covering the event mentions that invitations have been sent to high ranking figures on both ends of the US political spectrum, with few refusals received. Interestingly, the reporter notes, that a number of even fundamentalist religious leaders have begun to question Stryker's methods of calling out a single segment of society as being less than human, sentiments which echo  those of the Nazi's toward Jews during World War II.

Backstage at Madison Square Garden, Stryker and his Purifiers have set up and strapped Xavier into a large apparatus patterned after Cerebro (my personal head canon is that Stryker used his money and influence to enable him to bring the device in). Unlike Cerebro, though, this device will destroy any active or latent mutant mind with which Xavier comes in contact. When Anne, the commander of the Purifiers, bursts in to report of the X-Men's rescue, Stryker tells her that he is unconcerned, because he is a "servant of the Lord".

A short time later, and within the stadium proper, Stryker's rally is well under way. What's more interesting than Stryker's message, filled with the expected biblical alegories used to justify intolerance of mutants, though, is the audience's reaction to it. In a VIP box, a senator demands of a Presidential aid if the President (who would have been Ronald Reagan, if there was any real world overlap) is aware of the message Stryker is spreading. The aid states "The President is a fair minded man. He believes the Reverend's views deserve a hearing". Two police officers working security for the event are not only completely uninterested in the message Stryker's sermon, but are becoming completely unnerved by how that message of anti-mutant propoganda seems to be working the crowd into a frenzy.

As Stryker intensifies his speech, declaring all mutants as servants of Hell, he throws a switch behind his podium, activating the machine backstage. Immediately the X-Men, gathered a few hundred away on a building across the street, begin to feel the effect of the machine as crushing headaches. A young man on the street near the building who is either a latent mutant or an active mutant without a visibly obvious mutation collapses, blood streaming from his ears and nostrils. Nightcrawler, too, begins bleeding when he teleports down to the street to rescue the fallen mutant.

The X-Men know that the effect will only get worse, and that more mutants will be traumatised, but they also know that if they attack they'll only prove Stryker's rhetoric of mutants being a violent menace.

The decision is taken from them, however, when Magneto literally rips the roof off of Madison Square Garden and descends upon Stryker and his massive congregation like a furious angel. The senator in the VIP box points out that Magneto has replaced the roof "good as new", that he's making "an entrance not an attack", and that what Stryker is saying about mutants being the tools of the devil are the real danger. 

Stryker unknowingly makes good on the Senator's words when he directs the full force of the anti-Cerebro (that's not what it's called in canon, that's just what I'm calling it for simplicity's sake) at Magneto in a tight beam, blasting the Master of Magnetism from the air and into the crowd below.

With the effect of the machine being redirected, however, the X-Men are able to move in, and quickly engage the squad of Purifiers back stage. When Anne rushes the stage to warn Stryker that the X-Men are trying to free Xavier, she quickly and unexpectedly falls under the anti-Cerebro's effect, falling to her knees and bleeding from her nose and ears. Stryker denounces her without hesitation and, when Anne pleads with him not to reject her, shoves her off of the stage, exclaiming "Mutant hellspawn - I deny you! I cast you forever into the abyss!". Anne falls hard, fatally breaking her neck, Stryker now having committed, at the very least, manslaughter on live national television and before hundreds of first hands witnesses. The crowd erupts into a near panic, with half of the congregation turning on Stryker and the other half blaming Magneto for the Reverend's actions.

Backstage, Nightcrawler, Cyclops, and Wolverine use a combination of their abilities to free Professor Xavier from the anti-Cerebro, after which Cyclops destroys the machine with his optic blasts.

The immediate danger resolved, the X-Men proceed to the stage to confront Stryker, not with powers and pugilism, but with words of reason and tolerance to counter his message of hatred and extermination.

In response to Stryker's angry rantings about being "an instrument of the Lord" and that mutants aren't human, Cyclops responds "Says who? You? What makes your link to heaven any stronger than mine?". He continues "Are arbitrary labels more important than the way we live our lives, that we're supposed to be more important than what we actually are?!". 

Stryker is having none of it though, and calls out Nightcrawler's obvious physical mutations as proof of mutant-kind's inhumanity. When Kitty counters that Nightcrawler's compassion makes him more human than Stryker could ever be, the Reverend responds the way that extremists often do when cornered by reason and the assertion that decency is an admirable human trait: with violence. Stryker pulls a gun and turns it on the X-Men, but before he can fire he is shot and incapacitated by one of the police officers on the scene, and placed under arrest.

In the epilogue, the X-Men and Magneto are back at Xavier's mansion, watching a news report that Stryker has been indicted on charges rising from the incident at Madison Square Garden. After Magneto comments that "the man may be beaten, but his cause lives on", and eludes that anti-mutant sentiments are growing in strength, there is some debate between him, Xavier, and Cyclops as to the direction the X-Men should take going forward. Xavier suggests that they should join Magneto (who at this point in continuity had ceased acts of terrorism, but was still strongly in favor of mutant isolationism), while Cyclops argues that they should continue to struggle in the fight for mutant acceptance. After some hesitation, Xavier rejects Magneto's offer, and Cyclops confides in Storm that his faith in humanity is one of love over hate.

                    ********************

Though undoubtedly a dark story, I like the note of hope and potential positivity that ends God Loves Man Kills. I admit to not being overly familiar with American social politics of the early 80s, but I'd like to think that there was a sense of slow but steady progress. The X-Men comics of the time period, I believe, have that same sentiment, that the future has the potential to be very, very bad, but that the push toward social progress will eventually win out.

I'll be very honest, though, that it's hard to look at this view from a present day standpoint and not perceive it as charmingly naive. In the Marvel Universe, William Stryker would go on to be convicted of his actions and would spend several years in prison (I would assume, at the least, for voluntary manslaughter and aggravated assault, as well as possibly felony terroristic acts - I'm a criminal justice nerd). I would like to think that were a similar situation to happen in the real world - a rich and influencial man causes the death of a person then turns a gun on a group of people, all on national television - that similar repercussions would have been the result.

Sadly, though, we live in a time and a place where an often-accused predator, a racist and misogynist who advocated the removal of amendments that ended slavery and guaranteed women's right to vote, an extremist who publically supported the idea that it should be illegal to follow any faith but his own, was only very narrowly defeated in a race to be part of the county's highest legislative body. We live in a time and place where judicial precedent is being set that allows for the open discrimination against LGBT persons to "protect the freedoms" of those doing the discriminating. We live in a time and a place where, as I'm typing these words, a bill has just been passed that will rob the poor and powerless to give even more money to those already wealthy and influencial.

I cannot help but believe, in this time and in this place, that if a man of Stryker's affluence and political influence had committed the crimes for which he was arrested in God Loves Man Kills, he would have been exonerated as having acted on "sincerely held beliefs".

Occasionally, however, I find small opportunities for hope. Every time I read of a harmful piece of legislation being defeated I feel like there may be the potential for progress. Every time I read of a person being elected to office to believes in the rights of people of a racial, gender, or sexual demographic beyond just my own I feel like we may at least be dragging ourselves in the direction of that process by our very fingernails.

Our flaws as a county, generations of systemic indifference and intolerance, once thought quashed or driven to the extreme fringes, has been exposed as a seething infection. Maybe fighting against that darkness is a fool's mission, a Quixotic quest. As Sensei Logan tells Magneto, though, "The world's got no shortage o' windmills t' tilt at".

                    ********************

This, at long last, concludes our discussion of God Loves Man Kills. I'd like to think that my thoughts on this classic work has inspired some thoughts of your own. Whether you agree with me or you think I bleed precious individual snowflakes (my blood is actually composed of coffee, melodic death metal, and 24 hour news cycles) I want to hear your thoughts. As always, the best way to contact me, via tweet or direct message, is @IamGrantRichter.

If you like the way I string together typed words and put them out into the blogosphere, and if you'd like to actually hear me espouse my opinions on comics and philosophical issues, be sure to check out the upcoming podcast KRAKATHOOM, featuring me and Herman Louw, host of the Longbox of Darkness podcast. Look for it soon!

When Feral Samurai returns, I'll be taking on a very different X-Men story, with my overview of the Brood Saga. Until then, see you neXt time Muties!