Returning to my earlier theme, here's yet another new ongoing X-book.  Emma Frost is, it seems, an entire series devoted to the origin story of Emma Frost.  Well, at least they didn't put "Because you demanded it" on the front cover.

They did, however, put some Greg Horn art on the front cover, which is not a good trade-off.  I am not going to go into detail about the cover.  Do not mistake this for indifference.  I loathe the cover.  Violently and from the bottom of my soul, I truly hate it.  Normally I just roll my eyes at cheesecake art and ignore it, but Horn really irritates me.  He is very, very bad indeed, for reasons I could enumerate at tremendous length.

However, I find I have so much to say about Horn's failings that I think I'll save it for an Article 10 column instead.  Believe me, I am exercising tremendous self-discipline here.  I have so much vitriol I wish to spill.  Suffice to say that the cover is atrocious, embarrassing, and many other negative adjectives besides.  It also puts me in a thoroughly nasty mood before approaching the story, something that I am honestly having tremendous difficulty looking past.  To say that Horn's covers are a stumbling block for me would be a bit like saying that a landmine is likely to damage my trainers.  Be in no doubt as to the strength of my feelings on this subject.

But enough on that.  With real effort, I shall drag myself onto the less interesting topic of the contents.  There is the obvious initial question of quite why Marvel is publishing a story about Emma Frost as a teenager in the first place.  I'm a little unclear whether this is just the first arc or whether the book is sticking in the past indefinitely, but since the first arc is six issues long, it's going to be 2004 before that becomes an issue.  Regardless, there are certain handy rules of thumb in this world, and one of them is that prequels generally suck.  After all, it tends to ring false to suggest that something particularly dramatic happened in a long-established character's past which they've previously omitted to mention.  If any of this stuff really mattered, surely somebody would have mentioned it.

The arguments are slightly better for doing it with Emma, however, in that she was originally introduced as a villain; until Scott Lobdell began the process of reforming her and placing her in Generation X, few of her stories had really been about her.  The history of how she got to be the White Queen is comparatively unexplored territory which must be formative stuff in the character's life.  So writer Karl Bollers isn't totally at sea here.  But he faces another problem; while the territory hasn't been explored in detail, the general thrust of the history is well established, and the lay of the land was helpfully laid out by Grant Morrison in a recent issue of New X-Men (apparently intended for precisely that purpose).

Of course, it's no barrier to writing a successful story that the audience know the ending.  Nobody watches a romantic comedy with any real doubts about the ending.  But then, at least in those cases the audiences still accept that there's a theoretical possibility that something else might happen.  Bollers works within a framework where the outcome is absolutely predetermined and only incidental elements can really change; the journey therefore has to be absolutely compelling if the series is going to work.

Specifically, the journey is from ugly duckling to... well, self-confident supervillain, presumably.  This first issue does a perfectly reasonable job of setting out the starting point and establishing Emma as a sympathetic character.  The difficulty is that the initial set-up is fairly hackneyed stuff - she's a nice girl, she's bullied by the nasty popular girls, she's isolated at home, and so forth.  That said, it does do it rather more subtly than the somewhat similar New Mutants #1.  Moreover, the future course of the story ought to take it outside the usual set-up, which is "nice girl triumphs through power of self-confident niceness"; Emma's not taking that direction.

In fact, it's a fairly well constructed story which benefits from a few re-readings, not least so that the parallels come out.  If the characters aren't entirely three-dimensional, they're at least making a reasonable stab at two, and there's space for development.  It certainly gets points for giving plausible motivations for its villains - the bullies see Emma as rich and privileged, and her father has a blinkered view of the importance of the family name.  None of these are desperately original but they do at least make the characters believable.

And the artist, at least, understands that it's doing a story about a flat-chested teenage girl with an inferiority complex.  Not really what I associate with Randy Green, but his character designs are pretty solid.  His faces are often a bit wooden, but I can live happily enough with the interior art.

It's not a blowaway start, and if you're familiar with the outline of Emma's history which Grant Morrison laid out recently, then nothing here will really surprise you (except, perhaps, that brother Christian gets to speak - the need for a sympathetic character in the family explains why Morrison felt the need to introduce him).  Given the remit, though, Bollers and Green make a decent start.  The big question remains whether there was really a need to publish this series at all, and the jury's still out on that one.

Rating: B+

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