X-Men: God Loves, Man Kills

Next up:

1982 (Still one of the all-time great titles.)

Brent Anderson went on to do some fantastic work for Astro City, among other places. According to Neal Adams (scroll down at this site to see his original pages) this was originally plotted by Jim Shooter, but Shooter has no memory of this and Claremont denies it. Regardless, Anderson's artwork for God Loves, Man Kills is pitch-perfect: searing images and cinematic visual storytelling at its finest.

Continuity-wise, it takes place somewhere between X-Men #167 and #168, though the events of the story are not acknowledged or ever referenced again until 2003. The seeds were sown here, though, for Magneto's evolution from arch-villain to redeemed headmaster. As this was more or less my first introduction to the character, I had little difficulty adjusting to this version of the character though there are those that to this day still prefer him as a more traditional villain/ X-foil.

THE PLOT: A demagogue priest (William Stryker) has become the popular face of a growing anti-mutant agenda under guise of religious fundamentalism.

His operatives capture and stage the faked-deaths of Storm, Cyclops, and Professor X.

Can't fool Wolverine, of course. (I love this I've staged more'n a few such 'accidents' line. Details of Logan's past were teased for years. Eventually, he became more loaded with backstory than Kate from Lost, but it was great fun at the time.)

Stryker's endgame is to use Professor X's powers as a weapon to further his agenda, something he very nearly accomplishes by subjecting Xavier to "a truly inspired, utterly horrific unending virtual reality loop (where) demonized versions of the X-Men brutally attack and mutilate him." (description from here as are the quoted sections in the captions below.)

"There is so much going on in these panels."

"From the obvious comparisons to Christ on the cross to the utter depravity of the demonic X-Men."

"Not to mention Anderson's striking art work and the moody coloring job that only uses blood red and pitch black to intensify the horrors on display."

Elsewhere, Anderson utilizes a sepia-drenched style to tell Stryker's origin story. (A combat vet whose military service exposed him to deadly radiation, leading to his wife giving birth to a mutant. He kills both his wife and the baby and attempts to kill himself, but he survives. Recovering, he comes to believe God has chosen him to lead the crusade against the mutant infidel. Just another day at Professor Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters on Graymalkin Lane.)

Are you worthy, Charles? 

I can't stress enough how much of an impact the images above had on my young mind. This opening, as well:

Anderson's cinematic style (which was perhaps influenced by the type of visual storytelling Frank Miller had near-perfected on Daredevil) amplifies to great effect the emotional violence and anxiety of the plot and dialogue.

I must have read this graphic novel a hundred times in 1982 alone, to my brother's chagrin, as it belonged to him but was always in my possession. Oh the arguments we'd have about my endlessly appropriating all of his records, tapes, comics, et al. (This led to my mother writing our names on the covers of our comics in ink, to our mutual horror.) Reading it today, what jumps out at me is how Kitty-Pryde-centered it is. A lot of 80s X-Men was, of course; her evolution as a character anchors Claremont's decade of X-storytelling. (Technically, it's more than that, but I'm unofficially dating The Claremont Era as 1981 to 1991.) 

It reminds me a bit of when John Romita, Sr. took over the art on Spider-Man. He rose through the ranks of romance comics, and under his watch, Peter Parker slowly transformed from an awkward teenager into a more handsome adult. This was, according to Stan Lee, unintentional, but it brought a sense of realism and time passing to the character and the comic. The same could be said for Kitty Pryde's growth from scared teen with a crush on Colossus to the woman she'd become as Shadowcat.

Joss Whedon has spoken at length about the influence Claremont had on his own storytelling, and that influence is easily seen throughout God Loves, Man Kills. Whether it's the emphasis on a female protagonist learning to hone her powers and control her emotions, or a family of outsiders battling outside oppression: 

Here the X-Men gather to watch Professor Xavier debate Stryker on Nightline.

 

This family-building is perhaps made a bit too explicit at novel's end.

but it was certainly effective at the time. Great use of light and shadow, here, as well.

Or something like this:

It's easy to see how Claremont's X-verse became the Whedonverse in subsequent decades. (Fitting that Whedon is now the man in the chair for the Avengers; if only he'd take over the other franchises, too!)

Some other tidbits:

This reminded me of the end of The Dead Zone. I guess both are channeling The Manchurian Candidate, come to think of it.

Methinks the Purifiers have been reading too many comic books:

Probably should've checked the trunk first, fellas.

Additionally, presumably they hung the "Mutie" sign over the license plate to leave a message to those who would find the body. Why make it completely illegible by shooting it all to pieces, then?

Cops play a rather strong role in the proceedings. First with this unintentionally-mildly-humorous sequence:

Oh... Sorry, kid.

and then at the end of the Madison Square Garden sequence:

Amen, brother.

Speaking of Madison Square Garden, Magneto interrupts Stryker's speech by peeling back the ceiling and floating down through the arena, leading to this exchange:

It definitely makes the story better to show some of the authority figures (politicians, cops) are not mindlessly swept along mindlessly by Stryker's Old Testament-twinged invective, but it's a little funny the lengths Claremont goes to demonstrate this. "Don't be a fool, dammit! He's replaced the roof, good as new! Isn't Stryker the real monster?!"

A lot of God Loves, Man Kills was lifted for X2: X-Men United. The part of Stryker is played by Brian Cox:

who in the words of this enthusiastic reviewer "Brian Coxes the shit out of the role."

but many things were lost in translation. (For a list of alterations, check the wiki.)

I knew that a sequel was written as part of X-Treme X-Men about 10 years ago, but what I didn't realize until looking it up just now is that it was written by Claremont himself. This makes me marginally more curious to read it. If I do, I'll put it up here, but I might not. (The covers gallery is everything I hate about what happened to cover art. That's enough to keep me at arm's distance, I'm afraid.) I will cover at least some of Claremont's later X-efforts, though, when I get to X-Men Forever. 

Great stuff and well worth your time. I leave you with these words from Den of Geek's review of God Loves, Man Kills:

"The real masterstroke, in terms of story telling is in the tale’s resolution. I won’t spoil it for you here, but it is a victory for common sense. While most comic books finish with the spandex-clad hero getting one over on some ranting madman, there is a proper, thought-provoking, bittersweet conclusion here. Remember this was 1982, comics were not cool and adults did not read them. Alan Moore had not written Watchmen yet. Comic shops were still run by that guy from the Simpsons and if you told a girl you liked Doctor Who, she would laugh at you. But the ending of God Loves, Man Kills is a grown up ending – the sort you would talk about to your mates if you saw it in a film."

X-Men: Mutant Massacre

1986 was a watershed year in comics history. Out with the old (R.I.P. Gardner Fox, pre-Crisis  Superman / Batman) and in with the new (John Byrne's Man of Steel, Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns.) And let's not forget the publication of Watchmen and Maus, still among the industry's most critically acclaimed achievements.

Meanwhile over at Marvel:

"The biggest news for Marvel in 1986 was that the company was sold from Cadence Industries to New World Pictures (...) for $45.5 million in cash. Cadence's shareholders received $17 per share, less than half of the stock's actual value at the time. The sale netted large profits for Cadence's executives, but the sale cost many of the rank-and-file employees at Marvel significant amounts of money. The executives cleaned out the pension fund, diminished health coverage, and even threatened to reduce the company's generous and revolutionary royalties plan - all in an attempt to decrease the company's costs and increase their personal wealth.

Marvel was extremely profitable in the mid-1980s, dramatically increasing their already huge market share and expanding the merchandising of its characters. However, the conditions around the sale to New World contributed to a general sense of malaise for employees at the company. There was a sense that upper management didn't care about the company's ordinary staffers."

That's from Keith Dallas's American Comic Book Chronicles - the 1980s. For more on the Cadence Caper, check out Jim Shooter's blog entry on the subject.

I'm sure that the parallels between this description of what Marvel's executives were doing and the plot of the company's big cross-over event of the year (i.e. the Mutant Massacre, where for three months ruthless assassins hired by a shadowy unknown ("Mister Sinister") went on a rampage through the sewers to indiscriminately slash and slaughter the community of mostly defenseless Morlocks (outcast mutants) who lived there, while the company's biggest moneymakers (the X-Men) were forced into desperate reaction mode) are a complete coincidence. Nevertheless, it's interesting from an "As Above, So Below" sort of way.

Original ad for the event. Either I'm flow-chart-illiterate, or this is design confusion incarnate.

The official big event of Marvel's publishing calendar in '86 was the launch of the New Universe. But sales and fan reactions were both disappointing; it would limp along until finally put out of its misery a few years later. The actual big event, though, was the return of Jean Grey, aka the original Marvel Girl, who was - I'm sure I don't have to tell you - killed at the end of the Dark Phoenix saga six years before.

It was not the first (nor would it be the last) time Jean Grey died or came back to life.

From The Comic Book Heroes, an oft-inaccurate but compulsively readable history of comics by Will Jacobs and Gerard Ryan:

"Chris Claremont (writer) and Dave Cockrum (artist) needed a big event for issue 100. (Aug 1976) They decided it would be the death of Jean Grey, the former Marvel Girl. Two months later, in the next issue - for X-Men was still a low-selling title, published only bi-monthly - she turned out not to have been permanently killed by the solar storm that she flew her spacecraft through but to have been filled with a power that enabled her to resurrect herself. "Hear me, X-Men!" she declaims. "No longer am I the woman you knew! I am fire! I am life incarnate! Now and forever... I AM PHOENIX!"

Readers of any of the X-titles of the 80s would have plenty of opportunity to see that speech again, as practically every female character Claremont wrote uttered some variation of those words, at some point.

Jean Grey's return was a three-book event, the third of which was the launch of a new series reuniting the original X-Men for the first time since the 60s.

The conceit of X-Factor was that the original X-Men, alarmed at the growing state of anti-mutant hysteria, posed as mutant hunters in order to safeguard the innocent from the witch-hunt. Within a few issues, they'd acquired their own team of super-villain nemeses (The Alliance of Evil) and, beginning in the Mutant Massacre, someone who'd prove to be one of mutantdom's biggest bads, Apocalypse.

Although the X-editors would abandon the mutant-hunter cover story in the 2nd year of the book's existence, both the return of Jean Grey and the true identity of the X-Factor team were still a secret at the time of the Mutant Massacre, as evidenced in these dialogue and thought balloons from Wolverine:

The story flowed through four issues of X-Men, three issues of X-Factor, two issues of Thor, and one issue apiece of New Mutants and Power Pack. The thing these titles had in common was Louise Simonson either as a writer or an editor. Outside of Chris Claremont himself, no other writer is more responsible for mutant affairs in the 80s than Mrs. Simonson.

I wasn't a particular fan of New Mutants or Power Pack at the time, but I was familiar enough with them. (From the late 70s to about 1990 I was pretty much the definition of the Marvel Zombie, so it was standard practice to familiarize myself even with titles I didn't read regularly.) And while the New Mutants story is probably the weakest of the bunch,

- despite this appearance from Magus. (Unrelated to the events of the MM. I just like the character/ set-up.)

the Power Pack story is surprisingly effective. Juxtaposing actual infants against the killing machines of the Marauders generates some very effective drama

Not bad art, either. Jon Bogdanove is underrated.

and in the case of Cyclops - who spends a lot of time elsewhere thought-ballooning on his own baby and baby-mama drama and jealousy re: Jean's affections - character growth.

Awww. Poor Leech.

The two Thor issues are great. Louise was married to Walt, who was nearing the end of his stellar run on the title, and Thor ended up drawn into the killing sewers via this callback to one of the many memorable story arcs Simonson brought to the table:

i.e. Thor, the Frog of Thunder

A side note: I will forever be grateful for coming of age in an era that had Claremont on X-Men, Simonson on Thor, Miller on Daredevil and Batman, and Byrne on Fantastic Four.

As the name might suggest, the Mutant Massacre served up generous helpings of angst and utlraviolence, twin trends that summarized what fans wanted from their superhero comics in the 80s.

Art by Alan Davis. (Spoiler alert: Rogue's not actually dead.)

Art (on X-Men) by the incomparable John Romita, Jr.

Art on X-Factor by Walt Simonson

 

The violence of the Marauders was not as shocking as the violence from the superheroes themselves, though, starting with Colossus at the end of the first issue (X-Men 210).

This definitely shocked me at the time. Like I say, violence was a growing part of the comics landscape over the 80s, but from Colossus? Peter Rasputin, the gentle armored giant? This imbued what the Marauders were up to a sense of urgency and fear that other big events (such as Secret Wars) or even big deaths (such as in Crisis) failed to generate in me. (Those last 3 panels could be a Roy Lichtenstein triptych.)

But it wasn't just Colossus.

Cyclops dispatches of Berzerker, who wasn't a Marauder but a Morlock lashing out violently.

Jean kills Prism. (And doing doesn't have much effect on her, either. Perhaps all those deaths and resurrections left Jean with a blasé attitude with regard to both The Great Beyond and dispatching people to it.)

And Thor straight up kills Blockbuster's; death by Mjolnir-to-face. Then again, Thor probably mistook Blockbuster for some kind of Frost Giant, and as we all know, to the son of Odin, every Frost Giant is guilty until proven dead.

All of this, as shocking as it was to a 12-year-old me, was very much of its time. Again, from the Jacobs/ Jones book:

"Although Claremont kept X-Men within a context of familial devotion and community, it was surely as clear to him as to anyone at Marvel that the moments of sheer violence were selling well. Wolverine releasing his claws with a "snikt!" and a nasty grin, the slimeball muggers about to jump Storm without knowing her power to rage - they were becoming every Marvel Zombie's favorite moments, because they promised releases of pure mayhem."

"Marvel's official position was that no hero ever kills, but it was a position kept in the drawer until parents complained. Wolverine's claws slashed deeper and more often, the black-ink blood splashed more freely, and readers were free to conjecture whether he was wounding or killing his foes. Most readers preferred the latter." 

"Despite some comic relief and some tough-guy talk, the overpowering seriousness of every character and every scene made X-Men the purest drug on the comics market, uncut by Stan Lee self-parody or Frank Miller sophistication. Even the other soap opera masters, like Marv Wolfman, stopped at the brink of total excess, but total excess was what hundreds of thousands of fans wanted in the 80s."

The Mutant Massacre was a potent harbinger of things to come, both at Marvel and elsewhere, as huge multiple-title cross-overs became first a yearly event, then a semiannual one, and finally an endless thing, steamrolling over all storylines and continuity in a furious race to one-up the previous one. A tradition that unfortunately continues down to the present day. Event fatigue (and variant cover fatigue) combined to strip-mine the superhero audience altogether in the 90s.

But that was all still to come in 1986. When the Massacre ended in X-Men 213, readers were left a little perplexed (who the hell was Mister Sinister? Did all the Marauders escape?) shocked (so much death! Shadowcat in permanent (well comics-permanent, i.e. not very) phase! Nightcrawler mortally wounded! Colossus unable to revert from his armored state!) and absolutely riveted. And the groundwork was laid for the next big-X-event, Fall of the Mutants.

Angel would become Archangel, aka "Death," one of Apocalypse's Four Horseman.

Apocalypse can be seen throughout the Massacre on his recruitment drive.

Other changes: Sabretooth was repositioned from the Iron Fist villain he'd been originally into more or less a villainous version of Wolverine.

There had never been any previous mention of Sabretooth having a healing factor, for example.

He probably would have appreciated knowing he had it in this fight with Luke Cage.

I'm unsure if the backstory presented in Origin is still canon or not, but that series did a great job of tying up the Wolverine/ Sabretooth backstory. It came out 11 or 12 years after I stopped reading Marvel regularly, but a friend recommended it to me so I picked it up. And was really impressed. I don't have much nice to say about Marvel after 1990 or so, but here and there (usually with "elseworlds" type stories that rely on the 1960-1990 continuity for foundation like Earth X or 1602) they remind me why I loved this stuff so much as a kid and teenager.

Another sign of things to come - Psylocke (i.e. Betsy Braddock, brother to Captain Britain, who would soon join Rachel Summers, Kitty Pride, and Nightcrawler in Excalibur, another by-product of the Massacre) was introduced immediately prior to this storyline, but she came into her own (and joined the X-Men, proper) by its end. Like a lot of Marvel's heroines, though certainly not all, she was introduced as a competent, three-dimensional character with realistic proportions:

and quickly morped into the vampy, cartoonish slut look that came to define the Scarlet Witch, Spider-Woman, Tigra, She-Hulk et al. within only a few years. Unsurprisingly, this masturbational-fantasy version of Psylocke is the one you see at cosplay conventions these days.

Somewhere around the advent of the guys who would eventually form Image, the character models that had been painstakingly developed by John Romita, Sr., Gil Kane, Jack Kirby and other legends, where tossed aside in favor of swiped poses from the Victoria's Secret catalog, girls with slits for eyes and basketballs for chests, and endlessly 'roided-up guys in mid-roar slugging each other in a cacophony of splash pages and "decompression." And the tight and compelling action of the Mutant Massacre was tossed aside for repetitive and transparent gimmicks masquerading as "event storytelling." Bah humbug.

Again, these things existed in the comicsverse before the Image guys became convenient shorthand for this trend Idiocracizing the industry - and of course there have been loads of compelling comics to come out in the years between then and now, but nothing like the tight and wondrous continuity of 1960 to 1990 - but it's both nostalgic and kind of sad to revisit this storyline in 2014. In much the same way the sexual boldness and meta-narrative of something like Watchmen was copied so widely but oh-so-poorly - often ending up emphasizing the very traits something like Watchmen so brilliantly deconstructed- the best aspects of Claremont's unprecedented years on the X-books somehow became the diluted, inferior template for all subsequent versions.

Covers Gallery