X-Men - God Loves, Man Kills

[history79]

28 pages of 84

Comments

[angelophile]

It always was, and still remains, a masterpiece. And that opening scene with the children being lynched never gets any less horrifying.

[icon_uk]

And it never should.

[angelophile]

Right. You'd think, though, in the intervening years with comics constantly pushing boundaries, that this might have lost its impact. But it hasn't. And must have been even more shocking at the time of its release, before the grim 90s reinvention of comics and graphic novels as an adult medium.

[scorntx]

And how horrific is it that even in this day and age, over thirty years later, the message of the story remains every bit as relevant.
That there are those, not even fictional people, who actually think Stryker is sympathetic.
Any sympathy for that man vanishes either with the realization he's the man behind the people who killed children, after killing their parents, or the flashback where he kills his wife and child, and has the nerve to go "it's all her fault".
This man and his followers are disgusting... and disgustingly real.
People who build giant killing robots are one thing, because mercifully there are no killbots in real life.
There's a good disconnect of fictionality there, but... even with his plotting here, Stryker is just...


... on a less preachy note, while that scene with the children being murdered is horrific, the scene of Magneto finding their bodies could've had more impact if Claremont had just the page be silent.
The image speaks for itself. And it's a damn powerful image.
But... Claremont.

[riddler13]

True, it would have been even more magnificent, but even so, it's impacting.

And the Clark Kent reporting bit was already growing old back then.

Still a classic, though.

[starwolf_oakley]

And Claremont has done silent panels. In Marada the She Wolf, at least.

[sarahnewlin]

That panel of him shoving Anne off the platform to her death just makes me flinch every time. More than Gwen Stacy even....

Police sympathy

[rzerox21xx]

I like how in this story, Claremont made the cops sympathetic and reasonable. its easy for most X-writers, especially in Bendis run to write cops going "MUTIES" SHOOT THEM". Yeah sure police brutality is real but not all cops are trigger happy racist bigots. I like how the cops in this story think Stryker is crazy and would side with the X-MEN especially that one cop that saved Kitty.

[thanekos]

People see a lot of resemblances in Anderson's Stryker- James Coburn, Martin Landau, Mike Pence.

(Per him this year, though, Stryker's modeled after Reagan's first Secretary of State, Alexander Haig.)

[thenicochan]

The whole story is excellent, but I especially love the character bits with Ororo and Scott at the end. I feel like that final scene really defined their closeness as friends. If only that bond could have remained consistent...