THE WORLD OF MISBEGOTTEN
The year is 2097, A.D. In the aftermath of an asteroid collision, a wave of religious revival has swept over North America’s scorched cities. The Statue of Liberty has a cross instead of a torch and the Holy Infant has replaced the tablets… Welcome to the land of Amerikania, the first country dedicated to the Sacred Heart of the Virgin.
It’s the dawn of a new Dark Age. Swords and sandals are back in style, gunpowder is banned, and all technology is from the Devil. Or almost all—the Jesuits, monk-warriors led by Father Elano, are still flying helicopters. They are God’s marines, and air mobility gives them a holy edge when raiding the pagan tribes in the West.
In the East, stuck in the Mid-Atlantic, looms Harlequin Island, an artificial island inhabited by a community of self-exiled libertarians led by Sir Gottfrey. A maverick genius who lives with his organs outside his body, Gottfrey has populated the island with clones of the past’s famous and infamous—the replikas—to serve his enclave of freethinkers.
The Church tolerates the libertarians’ colony and has deployed in its vicinity an aircraft carrier retrofitted into a floating monastery led by Father Micon, a Franciscan priest. Rechristened Domus Mariae, the ship serves as a hospice for all the replikas who, as they approach their expiration date, decide to run away and die at peace with God.
To celebrate the twentieth anniversary of his colony, Sir Gottfrey is bent on staging a highly authentic Easter Pageant featuring the J-Clone, a Jesus look-alike cloned from a drop of blood collected from the Shroud of Turin. But Double-M, a replika of Marilyn Monroe (and J-Clone’s girlfriend!) has other plans. She won’t allow Gottfrey’s wrath to fall upon her lover boy.
Double-M runs away from the island and, disguised as a nun, infiltrates the Vatikan and alerts the Church about the upcoming show featuring Gottfrey’s own personal Jesus. The (holy) s#!t hits the fan at the Holy See! Crying “Blasphemy!”, the Pope summons Father Elano from his crusading campaigns and sends him to crash the libertarians’ sacrilegious masquerade and kidnap J-Clone!
To fulfill his obedience vow, Elano infiltrates Gottfrey’s secluded playground searching for the island’s most famous resident and soon-to-be actor extraordinaire. It is there, lost in a netherworld swarming with dying replikas, obsolete mutants, and vat-born monsters, that the Jesuit priest is forced to confront the truth about his own birth, an event as immaculate as it can get.