God Loves, But Mind Control Still Kills part I: Here we go again...

Back in the early 00's, Marvel celebrated its initial successes at the box office thanks to the first Spider-Man and X-men movies.

2003 brought Ang Lee's Hulk and more importantly X-2, heavily based on Chris Claremont's fan favorite God Loves, Man Kills graphic novel from 1982. While the movie version of William Stryker was a military commander instead of a reverend, the powers that were at Marvel still felt the movie should warrant a comics tie in. Ahhh, synergy... It truly is a wonderful thing.

Naturally the task to write this tie in fell on Chris Claremont, who came up with the six part God Loves, Man Kills II that played out in the pages of X-treme X-men, starting with issue # 25. Naturally, the reverend William Stryker had a starring role. However, which version of Stryker? Claremont's 1982 original...

Or someone more like actor Brian Cox, from the actual movie Marvel's marketeers were trying to plug?

Oh, you guessed it... right down to the goatee...

So what had Stryker been up to since he got sent to prison after killing a woman on live tv? Well, he's still in prison, where he's being treated as a celebrity of sorts.Not every inmate gets a private jet to take him back to his prison cell after hearing serial killer Aaron Pankow's confession. Something is up with Stryker and Sage is all over the case. Hey, she *IS* the X-men's mentat after all...

At first, the X-men don't consider Sage's Stryker newsflash too important... but the reverend's travel plans soon take a turn for the worse as an old foe of the X-men manages to worm her way aboard his jet.

Yuriko Oyama, Lady Deathstrike for her enemies, featured heavily in the X-2 movie. So it only makes (commercial) sense she would have to appear here as an ally of Stryker's as well, in spite of any previously established continuity between the two of them. Rescuing the reverend by killing his captors and crashing the plane, she also manages to place the blame like a pro...

So, the X-men have been accussed of downing a plane and causing the death of at least half a dozen people. Of course we know it's a lie, but why would the team even consider getting close to the scene of the crime?

After all, apart from the old 'guilty by association' line, contaminating the crime scene with their presence and finger prints would only work to incriminate them further... Yet, the X-men travel to the site of the crash where Wolverine realises that the corpses in the wreckage died from very familiar stab wounds. But before he could share his findings, the team was attacked by para military troops who appeared ready for them.

Meanwhile the reverend Stryker and Lady Deathstrike are in Chicago's The Belles of Hell bar to see an X-man who didn't want to be an X-man anymore...

"Yes, Deathstrike. She is PERFECT."

Stryker needed Kitty for his latest mission, but rather than asking for her help he tried to mind control her in the opening pages of X-Treme X-men # 26, which subjected Kitty to a plethora of alternate identities who tried to undermine her sense of self, in hopes of making her vulnerable to the reverend's subliminal recruitment message. 

Luckily, his slick sales pitch was undermined by an aspect of Kitty's mind, taking the form of her best friend Illyana Rasputin. Kitty cast the reverend out, leaving both Stryker and his team of mind control specialists baffled. She really should have succumbed to the procedure, yet her phasing powers made it impossible for the mind control techs to fully map her brain patterns.

Annoyed, Stryker asked Lady Deathstrike to use her impressive cybernetic abilities to check in on the surveillance team in Mount Haven, the location where this mission of his is supposed to go down...

You gotta love Lady Deathstrike's, in retrospect, low tech approach to surfing... Forget wifi, best way to go online is by shifting your fingers into com ports and dialing in. Still, despite the slow dial up, she made contact with the surveillance team...

Discovering their demise, she was confronted by the mysterious presence responsible for all the mayhem.. but managed to sign off before he could affect her. Or did she? 

Shocked to learn Deathstrike was being used as an unwilling assassin, Stryker ordered his followers to protect him, causing them to serve as little more than cannon fodder while he raced towards the cell of a  rather strung out Kitty Pryde. Revealing a metal slave collar around his neck, Stryker slapped one on Kitty too just as Deathstrike barged in for the kill.

Activating the collars, Stryker and Kitty manifested adamantium laced armor while waiting for the mind controlled Deathstrike to catch up. Just as Stryker used Kitty's phasing abilities to move to freedom, Lady Deathstrike was left alone with a rather chilling realisation...

The game was afoot as we'll see in the second part of God Loves, But Mind Control Still Kills: Haven Knows I Tried To Control You!