How much of it is based in the comics? I stopped buying them about 7 years ago or more and I never had what one would call a complete collection, but I don’t recall a William Stryker, or his Illusionist son Jason. Did they exist before the movie?
X-Men 2 is loosely based on the comic book “God Loves, Man Kills”, where a televangelist, Rev. Stryker, who’s violently anti-mutant, kidnaps Cyclops, Storm, and Professor X, and forces Professor X to identify and kill mutants using a version of Cerebro.
The other X-Men have to team up with Magneto to find them and stop Stryker’s group.
William Stryker was originally from the X-Men graphic novel, God Loves, Man Kills.
[spoiler]In the GN, Stryker was a former military man who worked around military tests with radioactive materials. His wife ended up giving birth to a mutant, and he killed both her and the child out of disgust. He tried to kill himself as well, but failed, and took that as a “sign from god” to become an evangelist and preach the dangers of mutantkind to the rest of the populace.
The plot idea of using Professor X to mentally kill all mutants in the world wa salso from the graphic novel, but instead of using a mind-controlled mutant to do the job, Stryker used a sensory depravation gizmo to trick Xavier into accepting God as his savior and killing mutants as doing God’s will.
The William Stryker of the grphic novel was fiercely anti-mutant, to the point where he killed his personal assistant – on national television – when they both discovered she was a latent mutant. He wouldn’t have used Deathstrike or Nightcrawler as he did in the movie.[/spoiler]
And the character of Jason (well, his powers) most likely come from the character of Mastermind, one of the earliest of the X-Men’s opponents, who masqueraded as “Jason Wyngard” during the “Dark Phoenix” saga. He was not Stryker’s son in the comic.
Speaking of Dark Phoenix…
Was I the only one who was expecting a Byrne-esque “Phoenix rising from the waters” shot at the end of the movie?
if I can add a question to this thread - who, in the comics, was in charge of the experiment that manipulated Wolferine, if it wasn’t Stryker?
Nope - I was expecting the same thing.
You are too early. That is how the next movies starts. At least that is what I expect.
I don’t think it was ever revealed.
I thought it was the Canadian Govt who experimented on Wolverine as part of their Weapon X program?
Wasn’t the Weapon X story revealed in Marvel Comics Presents? The scientist in charge was called Dr. Cornelius, who logan killed in Xmen 8 or 9 I think. I don;t know if they ever revealed who was behind it all though.
They’re slowly starting to drop more hints, though. In a fairly recent New X-Men, they introduced a character called Fantomex, some sort of super-ninja-assassin type. He told Prof. X and Jean Grey that Wolverine was not the end result of the Weapon X project, merely the tenth version, hence the X. Fantomex claims to be the thirteenth version, thus making him Weapon XIII, and the project is still ongoing. But he wears telepath-resistant headgear, and he doesn’t seem particularly trustworthy, so how much of that is true is unknown.
As for William and Jason Stryker, I posted my thoughts on them in another X-Men thread which I will summarize here:
.:Nichol:.