THE CREATORS: Writer Karl Bollers, penciller Randy Green and inker Rick Ketcham.

THE FILL-IN ARTIST COUNT: Nil.  Mind you, it's only been going six months, and they're changing artists for the next arc.

WHAT HAPPENED IN 2003: The six-part "Higher Learning" storyline.

As one book is cancelled, another begins.  And another.  And another.

Yes, it's Tsunami, in which Marvel take every concept that's worked for them over the last three years and do the exact opposite.  The Quesada/Jemas regime had a string of very successful launches and relaunches based on two simple, straightforward concepts.  One, big names where possible.  Two, one major event a month, and one only.  That way, nothing gets lost in the shuffle.  And every new series looks like an event.

Tsunami, on the other hand, was a wave of books based on the following premise.  Take a bunch of titles which have nothing in common whatsoever.  Bracket them together solely on the basis that they're being launched in the same month, thereby demonstrating a complete lack of understanding of what an imprint is for.  Get B- and C-list creators (albeit that many of them are deservedly on the rise) to write them.  And shove them all out there at the same time, so that nobody can remember what any of them are called.  Probably not even the Marvel editors.

The results were predictable.  Most of the Tsunami books sank without trace - even though, in some cases, they'd been very well reviewed.  But four Tsunami books bucked the trend and actually sold some copies.  Three of them were X-books - Emma Frost, Mystique and New Mutants.  The fourth was Venom, which also had a built-in audience.  (And proceeded to lose that audience almost immediately by being, far and away, the most slow and boring comic Marvel produced all year.)

Emma Frost is a strange title.  It sits awkwardly in the Marvel line, let alone the X-books, and seems caught in a dreadful dilemma about what it wants to be.  On one level, it's a commendable attempt to expand the line and produce something with potential appeal to that elusive bookstore audience.  No matter how elastic your definition of "superhero", Emma Frost is not a superhero series.  It's a teen drama where one of the characters happens to be telepathic.  This is a perfectly good idea.

On the other hand, it's also clearly an attempt to cash in on the X-books audience.  And those Greg Horn covers - those godawful, embarrassing covers, which bear no resemblance to the content of the book at all.  If Marvel really think there's such an audience out there for Horn's work, why not just launch a book called Tits Monthly and get him to do the covers for that?  At least he'd be at home.  Anyhow, the point is that even as Marvel tries to embrace one audience, it can't quite bring itself to let go of the direct market readers.  At some point Marvel is going to have recognise that these new readers they're aiming for are very, very different readers and there is no mileage in trying to produce hybrid comics which appeal to both demographics.

In fact, Emma Frost isn't a bad comic at all.  It's not spectacular, but it's a solid book which tells a decent story quite competently.  It hasn't impressed enough to shake off the impression of an unnecessary spin-off from a major franchise.  But it's done well enough that I can't begrudge it existing.  It's actually quite readable, which is more than I'd expected from it going in.

It's just those damned covers that make me want to throw things.  Then again, I see from the latest solicitations that Horn's cover for issue #9 shows a brunette Emma, in a T-shirt and jeans, and without particularly large breasts.  About bloody time.

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