A few years back, I wound up on an X-MEN convention panel along with Louise Simonson, and I was able to express just how impossible a bar she’d set for everybody who came after her as an editor on that particular line. In the space of a very short time, she’d finished up the DARK PHOENIX SAGA, overseen DAYS OF FUTURE PAST, brought Paul Smith on as regular artist, Launched NEW MUTANTS, oversaw the first WOLVERINE limited series and the X-MEN/NEW TEEN TITANS crossover, and put together this graphic novel. It’s an output that’s daunting for anybody to match, and I’d argue that this book is the best single-release summation of the appeal of the X-Men of that period and expression of the themes that were driving the series at that time. It’s a terrific piece of work.
The MARVEL GRAPHIC NOVEL line was part of Editor in Chief Jim Shooter’s attempts to pioneer new formats and to take advantage of the growing Direct Sales marketplace of comic book specialty shops. The MSGs were cast in the image of European albums which had begun to get spotty distribution in the States. They were larger than typical comic books, on better paper with better color. And they were intended to be more sophisticated, as the cover price–$5.95 at a time when a regular issue of X-MEN would set you back a tenth of that–insured that the youngest readers wouldn’t easily be able to purchase them. X-MEN was such a darling of the comic shops that talk about doing a graphic novel had been kicking around for some time. (Before it was shifted into the main series, Days of Future Past was initially conceived as an X-MEN graphic novel that Claremont and Byrne would collaborate on, for example.)
But when the time came to actually produce the X-MEN Graphic Novel, Louise and Chris had another artist in mind: Neal Adams. Neal still had a strong association with the X-Men from his time drawing the series in the late 1960s, and he was still enough of a superstar that him coming back to do such a book was money in the bank. And indeed, the process got far enough along that Neal had begun penciling, producing a number of pages that we spotlighted a few years back:
But ultimately, there were apparently aspects of the legal agreement for the project that Adams was uncomfortable signing, and he wound up walking away from the project, taking his unused and unpaid-for pages with him.
As a replacement, Simonson and Claremont brought in Brent Anderson, an artist who had made a bit of a splash drawing a revival of KA-ZAR. He’d also done a couple fill-in issues of UNCANNY X-MEN that showed that he was simpatico with Claremont and could deliver material that fit the characters and their world. Anderson’s work here is rich and lovely. He uses the larger original art size to allow himself to put more panels on a single page that was typical. Accordingly, he and Claremont were able to fit in a lot more story material than they might otherwise have been able to. The book is dense with incident, but there’s also sufficient real estate for the individual characters to get moments where they shine.
The story itself is a bit more real world and grounded that they typical X-Men fantasy adventure as well, steering directly into the strip’s central themes of persecution and bigotry. the story introduces Reverend William Stryker, an evangelical preacher who believes that mutants are the spawn of the devil and whose Purifier troops are sanctioned to employ lethal force against them. Stryker is cast in the image of the Televangelists of the period, but what makes him especially scary as a foe is that he legitimately believes the hate that he’s spewing and that his work is a holy crusade. He doesn’t merely proselytize against mutants, he’s actively making moves against them, blowing up the car carrying Professor X, Cyclops and Storm back from a televised debate with the Reverend and making it appear that all three have been killed.
Stryker intends to brainwash the Professor into using his mental powers to destroy the minds of all of the mutants in the nation through a Cerebro-like device. Unfortunately for his plans, Wolverine’s senses aren’t fooled by the decoy bodies left at the scene of the crash, and this leads to the X-Men attempting to follow the trail of the Purifiers back to Stryker. In these efforts they’re joined by an uneasy ally: Magneto. Claremont was well into his efforts to redeem the Master of Magnetism at this point, but this was the first story in which he and the X-Men stood side-by-side. The entire conflict culminates at a religious rally at Madison Square Garden where Stryker intends to put his plan into motion while broadcasting to the world. Magneto and the X-Men confront him there, and despite their best efforts, they still come across looking like the aggressors.
After the requisite action set pieces, the story culminates in a televised confrontation in which Stryker’s fanaticism pushes him too far. When he attempts to gun down the unarmed Kitty Pryde, who stands in defiance of him, Stryker himself is instead killed by one of the cops on duty as security, who couldn’t stand by and watch him shoot a young girl who was no visible threat to him. In the aftermath, Magneto once again argues that his way is the only way, that humanity will never accept mutants for who they are otherwise, and Professor X himself is on the verge of throwing in with his old friend. But it’s the X-Men themselves who refute Magneto’s way and resolve to find a solution to peaceful coexistence, no matter how much a fool’s errand that appears to be. The whole thing is a terrific one-off story that completely encapsulates the series while delivering a meaningful adventure. I really liked it.
But not everybody was so positive about this book. In fact, it got some news pickup about the controversial subject matter. Reporters weren’t convinced that the $5.95 cover price would prevent the book from being available to kids, and they certainly saw the benefit in generating outrage about the material. In particular Pat Robertson of the 700 Club unsurprisingly devoted a bunch of time in an episode to reviewing and excoriating the work:
Which, somehow, only increased its luster. “God Loves, Man Kills” is inarguably a strong piece of material, and it holds up well today–except for perhaps one sequence in which, in attempting to make her African-American dance instructor Stevie Hunter understand why she is so upset about the hateful rhetoric being used to describe mutants, Kitty Pryde hits her with the N-word. It’s a powerful moment, but more than a little tone-deaf given that all of the creators involved are white guys. This wasn’t the only time in these days that the N-word would be used in X-MEN in this context, though it’s been redacted for most modern reprintings over the past twenty years or so.
The Tom Brevoort Experience 