God Loves, Man Kills II (2003) isn’t a great story. It’s part of the larger X-Treme X-Men line, in which Chris Claremont got to do Claremontian things with the characters Grant Morrison wasn’t using for New X-Men. Like much of X-Treme, the arc suffers from inking and coloring that make characters look glassy, inert, a casualty of the early digital era. Igor Kordey’s admirably detailed, but often stiff pencils, don’t help. It’s not even the best Kitty Pryde story from that era, and it’s light on queer coding; if that’s what you want, try Mekanix (if you want Storm, Yukio and Calisto in a hot tub, try X-Treme X-Men: Storm: The Arena). And though it does bring the earlier story definitely into canon, GLMK2 is certainly not—in pacing, in craft, in emotional power—nearly the equal of its 1982 namesake.
That said, I want to get people to read it. GLMKII, as a story, turns out to be…. good. It shows Kitty (now Kate) facing up to her past and deciding, tentatively, to become a self-sacrificing public figure again. [Ed. note: We refer to Kate here as Kitty to avoid confusion; real people, especially trans people, who change our names as adults should be referred to by current names.] It handles tropes that Claremont took from print science fiction and from TV and from still-contemporary politics masterfully. And it brings up—in the way it handles separatism and the wish for escape, the human and mutant desire for a safe place and a new start—arguments that, in the era of Krakoa and (on our Earth) of populist nationalism, seem as powerful as they ever did.
The original God Loves, Man Kills introduces Reverend William Stryker, an anti-mutant evangelist and dead ringer for Mike Pence (seriously, it’s eerie) whose church has a national reach. Stryker and his minions kidnap and brainwash Charles Xavier in order to use his telepathy, along with a big machine, to kill all mutants. Kitty, Kurt, Scott and Ororo show up at the televised rally where Stryker puts his machine and his plan into effect, giving nosebleeds and headaches to mutants worldwide: after the Reverend cruelly throws his second-in-command—revealed as a mutant herself—off a high platform, some cops turn against him. The X-Men, along with Magneto, free the professor, and break the machine. Scott and Kitty then make impassioned speeches about equality on live TV: Scott asks Stryker, “What makes your link with heaven any stronger than mine? Are arbitrary labels more important than the way we live our lives?” Stryker pulls a gun on Kitty, but a cop shoots him before he can shoot her. Back at the mansion, our mutants discuss bigotry. Magneto asks Charles to join his mutant nationalism, and Charles says no: if his X-Men “are willing to give my dream a chance, then so am I.”
God Loves, Man Kills often gets recommended as a jumping-on point for readers new to X-Men. It may have been written with that goal. It’s a source for the Charles and Erik that some of us know, and ship, from the Fox X-Men movies, as well as a source of the plot for the first film. It’s dynamic and elegant, with bright flat colors over Brent Anderson’s carefully shaded pencils and inks. And it’s unambiguous in its conclusions: religious extremism, murder and bigotry bad; tolerance good. The only still-controversial bit involves a very young, very white, very naive Kitty using the n-word to make a point: she should not have done that.
God Loves, Man Kills II shows a less naïve Kitty and a more experienced X-team in a more complex world. Stryker, now a federal prisoner, hijacks and crashes a transport plane, with help from his family friend Lady Deathstrike. The X-Treme team flies to Montana to investigate. Kitty, now a student at the University of Chicago, talks to her therapist about Stryker, who represents one of her first brushes with death.
Stryker kidnaps Kitty and tries to brainwash her. Where he played on Charles’s savior complex in the 1982 story, now he appeals to Kitty’s sense of possibility: as an X-Man, she “saw her friends die.” She didn’t have to do that: she could have concealed her powers and passed for human. She could have been a physics professor, a dancer, a conventional mother. Stryker wants to distance her from other mutants, to wish for a society in which other mutants do not recognize her, or do not exist. But his appeal to her past selves is a mistake: a feisty teen Illyana appears alongside them. Katya and Yana tell Stryker to stick it.
Nonetheless the Reverend takes her with him to Mount Haven, a heretofore unknown town in the Pacific Northwest. Everyone there is a mutant. Most are children. All seem happy: they play baseball, frequent the malt shop, and laugh. Her handsome, blonde, clean-shaven host, a cleric named Paul, obviously runs the town. “This is what we dreamed of,” Kitty thinks, “when I was recruited for Xavier’s school.” But soon she gets debilitating headaches. Paul takes her to his high-tech church-HQ where his tiger-striped assistant Cybill tends to her. Convulsing and barely conscious, Kitty phases through Cybill—and apparently kills her. Why? Her phasing shouldn’t damage living organisms: it only disrupts machines.
Reverend Stryker emerges from the shadows with an answer. He brought her here in order to take down the town, whose founder is neither mutant nor human: “Paul” is a robot weapon from deep space who came to Earth, saw “light” in mutantkind, and resolved to “save” mutants from dangerous bigoted humans, taking over Mount Haven, killing all the baseline humans who comes there, and infecting the mutants with nanites, tiny agents of high-tech control. If you’ve lived there long enough, you’re full of them: that’s why Kitty’s phasing killed Cybill, and could kill Paul.
Stryker, Paul and Kitty then hold a stagy debate; all three quoting boatloads of Scripture. “My race is fighting for its very survival!” exclaims a goateed and red-faced Reverend. Paul says the same of the mutants he protects: “If they come to kill us, Kitty,” he asks, “should we let them?” Kitty points out that the two men share a very un-Biblical devotion to survival of the fittest, whether mutant or baseline human: “Listen to yourselves!” she tells them. “You’re virtually the same… we’re all children of God!” Must Kitty choose whether to kill Paul or de facto release him (since no prison could hold him)? Stryker—finally emulating Christ, in a way— sacrifices himself instead, taking the alien weapon into his body, then entering coma-like isolation. Storm, Sage, Cannonball and Logan then arrive, having spent most of the past four issues fighting with Lady Deathstrike or with one another. Kitty tells Storm she’s “done with costumes,” and that mutants should not hide; she then resolves to run for local office, presumably as an openly mutant candidate.
That’s about half of God Loves, Man Kills II (the rest is mostly combat in the woods). It’s a story that revisits much of Kitty’s character, along with slices of her earlier life: she’s conformist, and yet a leader, when others look to her; devoted to Judaism; respectful of other religions; proud, and given to showy self-sacrifice. It’s one of those stories where Claremont knowingly recasts tropes from science fiction prose, TV, and film: the community with no adults (also in two Star Trek: The Original Series episodes); the naïve, beautiful “savior” from outer space (Stranger in a Strange Land); the religion that’s really a techno-plague or a computer virus (Snow Crash). Finally, it’s one of Claremont’s most skillful deployments of the famous Mutant Metaphor, by which mutants stand for real persecuted groups, never perfectly for any group, and never for only one. It’s a story about assimilation, about separatist seclusion, and about violent revolution—and it argues forcefully against all three.
Kitty can pass for non-Jewish, and pass for a baseline human, something Stryker tries to exploit. She’s made several speeches on that topic too. Her powers even stand for her passing, and border-denying, ability: she crosses barriers that keep others apart. Stryker’s failed brainwashing tempts her to assimilate, to deny her (mutant) heritage. Paul’s way, on the other hand, looks like militant separatism: mutants in the aptly named Mount Haven live visibility unmolested, on their own. But the price of their separation is revolutionary violence, and the death of the older generation: Paul’s church has a pile of corpses in the basement, mere humans who did not (by Paul’s lights) deserve to live, even though some came there to help their mutant kids. Claremont’s dialogue (as in the 1982 original) invokes the Holocaust. The visuals—piles of bodies; empty churches; shining, sharp, steel— suggest the French Revolution too.
Stryker wants—or wanted—to exterminate mutant minorities; Paul, like extremists of many stripes, wants to make a new world for his own minority and doesn’t care who else he kills. And the people who choose to live in the revolutionary Utopian state—or who had no choice; they were brought so young—gradually find their own minds changed. Stay in Mount Haven long enough, and your brain, too, will get infected by nanites. You might find your previous beliefs replaced by a devotion to the nation-state, to the secluded town, to Paul: loyalty to a nation’s heartless leader replaces the cause the nation set out to defend.
That’s how revolutions eat their young. It’s one (very simplified) account for the rise of Napoleon. And it bears more than coincidental resemblance to some (again, simplified) accounts of Israeli history, from David Ben-Gurion’s Labor Zionism to Ariel Sharon’s, and then to Bibi Netanyahu’s, Likud. Claremont famously spent part of 1970 on a kibbutz (an Israeli cooperative settlement with centralized childcare, socialist ideology, and no, or severely limited, private property). The Holocaust survivors Claremont met there informed the way he wrote Magneto, whom Claremont likened to Menachem Begin; it’s not much of a stretch to think this 2002 story affected by the second intifada and the rise of (the then right-wing extremist) Ariel Sharon. It’s not hard to see, in Paul’s affection for mutants and in his unctuous self-presentation, echoes of real-life right-wing Christian philo-semites who “support” Israel, and its’ right-wing parties, in order to hasten the End of Days. And it’s no stretch at all to see in Kitty, here and later, a proud resistance both to violent, my-land-or-yours separatist nationalism and to assimilation: she announces, repeatedly, that she is Jewish, and that she does not want to separate herself from the rest of society.
These moving and emotionally effective beats throughout God Loves, Man Kills II look back to the much younger Kitty of GLMK, but also forward to the Krakoan era, when the X-Men have a nation state. Unlike Mount Haven, it’s not (at least not overtly) built on piles of bones. Nor is Krakoa (like, say, the U.S.) founded on violently taken land. Unlike Mount Haven, Krakoa trades with the rest of the world, supplying medicine in return for recognition. Unlike Mount Haven (so far as we know), it’s not a cover for a secret plan to infect citizens with nanites.
But like Mount Haven, it’s no place for Kate Pryde. This temperamentally optimistic icon of tactical passing, who can go places other mutants can’t, who revels in her visibility but also wants to do what humans do—from tending bar to running for office—finds herself unable to enter Krakoa the way all other mutants can. Marauders # 10 even includes a now-posthumous note from Kate to Nightcrawler (who famously does not pass): “why am I singled out? Why doesn’t our home want me?” One reason: she fits so well into the human (and the American) world. Kate concludes her letter to the Catholic Kurt, “you’ve always been a great friend and now I suppose you’re my rabbi too.”
That said, it would be an injustice to God Loves, Man Kills II—and to its precursor, and to Krakoa—to treat it only as a Jewish story, much less a story about Israel-Palestine. It’s a story about a character who wants to fit in as well as to stand out, about a character who wants to stop fights, who wants to respect all comers (even bizarrely bloodthirsty ones), who wants to avoid dividing people, towns, stories, up into yours and mine. It’s a mess. It’s awkwardly paced, and of its time. But it’s also, in places, beautiful; and it’s one of Claremont’s most searching considerations of a question that’s vexed almost all his years writing X-Men: when, and how, and whether, mutants—and anyone else who identifies with mutants—should set ourselves apart from the rest of humankind.
Stephanie Burt is Professor of English at Harvard and the author of several books of poetry and literary criticism, most recently Don’t Read Poetry: A Book About How to Read Poems (Basic, 2019). Her nose still hurts from that thing with the gate.
Stephanie Burt is Professor of English at Harvard. Her podcast about superhero role playing games is Team-Up Moves, with Fiona Hopkins; her latest book of poems is We Are Mermaids. Her nose still hurts from that thing with the gate.
