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shane_tiernan's review against another edition
3.0
Pretty dark stuff, as usual. It's like they're trying to get Jews and Palestinians to get along and work things out, except it's mutants and baseline humans. You've got extremists on both sides and then people in power trying to push their agendas by making the two sides hate each other even more.
crookedtreehouse's review against another edition
3.0
The entire run of X-Treme X-Men is wildly inconsistent, as Claremont constantly changes the focus of the book. The series definitely benefited from his abandonning the Destiny Journals quest, and the weirdly dated and uninteresting Lifeguard and...whatever Surfer Boy's name was...characters.
By this volume, the book is a series of side stories featuring Claremont's favorite characters. It consistently checks in with the Morrison run to explain why his characters aren't in that book. And, in this volume, it works.
I frequently reference how much I dislike Claremont's reliance on narration boxes, so I'm impressed that in this volume he'll often go six of seven pages without using any before he crowds the panels with overxplanations of backstory or descriptions of things we can clearly see depicted in the art.
The art in this book, while not great, is an improvement over the previous volumes. The darker tones are a better match for Jordey and Larocca's soft focus camera work.
The stories are okay. We see why Cannonball joined the team after the Weapon XIII storyline from Morrison's run, Rogue has been depowered and is living happily in California until an anti-mutant terrorist attempts to bomb a Lila Cheney concert, there's a weird Storm and Gambit storyline where they're maybe romantically involved for some reason and also trying to improve mutant human relations via Val Cooper? It's messy, but it's not terrible. I found it interesting enough that was disappointed when the volume didn't so much wrap everything up as just stop. And it's another abrupt change of focus coming up in the next volume.
I recommend it for Claremont fans, and people who enjoy Rogue, Gambit, Storm, Bishop, Cannonball, and Sage (surely, someone must be a huge Sage fan).
By this volume, the book is a series of side stories featuring Claremont's favorite characters. It consistently checks in with the Morrison run to explain why his characters aren't in that book. And, in this volume, it works.
I frequently reference how much I dislike Claremont's reliance on narration boxes, so I'm impressed that in this volume he'll often go six of seven pages without using any before he crowds the panels with overxplanations of backstory or descriptions of things we can clearly see depicted in the art.
The art in this book, while not great, is an improvement over the previous volumes. The darker tones are a better match for Jordey and Larocca's soft focus camera work.
The stories are okay. We see why Cannonball joined the team after the Weapon XIII storyline from Morrison's run, Rogue has been depowered and is living happily in California until an anti-mutant terrorist attempts to bomb a Lila Cheney concert, there's a weird Storm and Gambit storyline where they're maybe romantically involved for some reason and also trying to improve mutant human relations via Val Cooper? It's messy, but it's not terrible. I found it interesting enough that was disappointed when the volume didn't so much wrap everything up as just stop. And it's another abrupt change of focus coming up in the next volume.
I recommend it for Claremont fans, and people who enjoy Rogue, Gambit, Storm, Bishop, Cannonball, and Sage (surely, someone must be a huge Sage fan).
mjfmjfmjf's review against another edition
4.0
And then the art didn't suck. I've been reading X-Treme and the writing has been consistently good. I guess they changed the artists or at least the style - because this is much better. And I've read some around the edges of Rogue's life powerless in California. But it make a real difference to have a writer who cares about the characters and knows what to do with them. And it's not the crazy action or the horrible villains that makes the difference. It's who they are and how they act. Sam in the chunnel. Sam meeting Amara at the airport. Rogue - who I typically barely like being awesome. Bishop not being horrible. But then throw in realistic style art with a great color palette and lots of details, and you've got something a lot better. This wasn't a big or important book - it was just an ordinary one done extremely well. 4.5 of 5.
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