As the second X-Men film recedes into memory, X-Treme X-Men finally winds up the tenuously-linked "God Loves, Man Kills II." 

The difficulty with the film connection is that, aside from reusing Stryker's name, the film has got virtually nothing to do with the original "God Loves, Man Kills" story.  But that connection was enough to see us facing a second Stryker story, now including a completely arbitrary Lady Deathstrike role because she's in the film.

Given its dodgy provenance, the storyline has worked out a lot better than I'd expected.  Deathstrike's a needless complication, but Claremont has gone for a perfectly sensible approach in writing the sequel.  The structure of the first storyline was to put the X-Men and Magneto in an alliance of convenience against Stryker, another well-meaning villain.  With Magneto out of the way, the sequel puts the X-Men and Stryker into a similar alliance - though a much more loose and awkward one - against Paul, Stryker's mirror as a religious nut.

The ideas are all well and good; on the other hand, it's another story that does seem to have been padded out a bit.  Did this relatively straightforward plot really require six issues, three of them devoted to the X-Men wandering around Mount Haven?  Surely there's at least one issue's worth of material which could have been comfortably cut from this storyline in the interests of pacing.

The ending falters a bit as well.  Claremont wants to have Stryker see the light and sacrifice himself to avert the threat.  In principle that's fair enough, but it's hopelessly undermotivated.  He's been written consistently as somebody who sticks relentlessly to his religious worldview in the face of pretty much anything that's said to him; consequently, something truly revelatory ought to happen to him in order to justify a U-turn.  Instead Stryker sees the light largely because it happens to be convenient to the plot for him to do so.  It's the right ending, but it's not sufficiently built up.

That said, the storyline's had more good than bad to it; Mount Haven was a decent idea, and Igor Kordey appears to have found the measure of the characters.  I like the idea that Bishop's the only character immune to Paul's brainwashing because it's done by nanites - from his perspective, archaic technology that he was inoculated against in his home time.  That's a nice, casual use of his back story.

It's a flawed storyline, but it's still been decent on the whole..

Rating: B+

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