About book All-New X-Men Volume 4: All-Different (2000)
Immonen, who has worked on the pencils for this series from the beginning, leaves after issue 18 and pretty much everything else the series had going for it leaves as well. While Peterson is able to mimic Immonen's style the whole thing feels really forced and boring - most of the panels aren't nearly as dynamic or striking as his predecessor's. The one interesting thing that this comic does do is mimic previous comic styles as it flashes back in time - this was a really cool concept and I wish that the series (and the previous Battle of the Atom event) would have made use of aesthetic devices such as this to help tell the story. Think of how interesting it would have been to exaggerate current drawing styles to create the future superheroes (what would Liefeld's style look like 50 years from now? Even more stretched?!). That flashback scene is the only real interesting thing that this book has going for it. The wit and humor are wearing thin on me after going through 4 previous volumes of basically the same jokes. The series as a whole is starting to resemble a teenage daytime soap opera which makes total sense because that was basically everything that Ultimate Spider-Man was (which was O.K. to me at the time because I was participating in real-life teenage soap operas). But, now that I'm older I don't really care about all of these love triangles turned love squares, turned love pentagons - it's just boring. The series used to have a point when it contrasted the ideologies of the different mutant groups and all that jazz but now it's a bunch of "new" (but really, really old, actually) X-kids acting like the pubescent teenagers that they really are. Immonen returns for the next book, and crossover with Guardians of the Galaxy, the "Trial of Jean Grey" and I suppose I'll read through that but if that fails to go anywhere I'm prolly going to drop this series and pick up Uncanny Avengers and/or Uncanny X-Force (the pre-relaunch ones) and see how those books go instead. Volume 4 was okay. Not as altering as the first 3 Volumes, but also just kind of obscure. Fighting odd C-List AIM villains and a group that put an uncomfortable spin on "Christian Terrorism", was only offset by them adding Magik and X-23 to their ranks AND getting (very cool in my opinion) new uniforms.The bonus to this book was X-Men Gold, a 50th Anniversary issue featuring many different writers and artists from X history. While they were okay, the story about the classic X-Men trying to get a date with Jean was corny and threw the whole thing off for me.Looking forward to the crossover with the Guardians, but I hope this title doesn't lose the spark it achieved with Volume 1-3.Recommend, with a bit of the aforementioned hesitancy above.
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