After criticizing Vol 1 of the series, I felt that I should write an entry for X-Treme X-Men Vol 4, which collects the Mekanix #1-6 story. This storyline takes us away from X-Treme X-Men ensemble and tells the story of Shadowcat, ex-X-Man. After leaving the X-Men, she has decided to enroll in college. There she must deal with the fallout of the destruction of Genosha, rampant mutant discrimination on campus, and the threat of new and improved sentinel bots.

This story is not your typical X-Men formula of "lets get together and fight the super villain and/or super group." Rather, it focuses on a single individual, stripped of her uniform, and forced to confront the bigotry directly (instead of its usual place as a backdrop to an X-Men story). I liked this approach a lot and I thought that it made for a better story. You usually don't read an X-Men story where the character visits her shrink, or spends her night bartending, and it serves to take the character out of the fantasy "Xavier school of gifted children" and place her into a slightly more real campus setting that college students can better relate to.