I've been out of town for the last few days, and as a result, I've only just picked up this week's X-books earlier today.  And I haven't read them yet.  I could, I suppose, just delay the column for a couple of days.  But I did that a fortnight back.

So instead, something I only do every couple of years - I'm going to write the reviews as I read the books.  Because here at the X-Axis, we believe that shameless gimmickry will distract from poor quality workmanship.  Who says you can't learn anything from comics?

Emma Frost is first up, with part 4 of "Mind Games."  Thus far, this arc has been an exercise in Emma gaining a bit of independence away from home.  It's been pleasantly readable, but it definitely feels like it's been dragged out in order to make for a longer trade paperback.  Does it really need six issues for what's essentially a three-character plot (Emma meets boy, boy owes money to loan shark, Emma tries to help him out)?

Ah, now this is promising.  Karl Bollers has come up with a plot direction I didn't expect.  Troy comes up with an "everyone wins" plan - pretend to hold Emma hostage, and get some ransom money from daddy.  Okay, it's not the most original story in the world, but it makes sense and it wasn't predictable, so I can live with that.  It also means that Bollers gets to bring the rest of the Frost family back into the story - I'd been wondering what the point was of giving so much space to Adrienne in the previous arc, given that her plot never really went anywhere, but this makes things clearer.

The book's still a bit short of genuinely original ideas.  I've seen most of the plot ideas here before.  But it's all assembled in a very readable way, and Bollers does manage to prevent most of his plot twists from seeming overly obvious, even when they're things we've seen a hundred times before.

Perfectly solid, but still lacking a little in originality.

Oh, by the way, are they running the covers on this book out of synch or something?  Because the cover of Emma playing cards would have made perfect sense two issues ago, but has nothing whatsoever to do with this issue.

Rating: B

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