Emma Frost is one of the handful of X-books that's simply ploughing on with business as normal during Reload.  We're now up to the penultimate chapter of "Mind Games", and I'm starting to see where this is heading - I assume the idea is to set Emma up with some of the family fortune without undermining the idea that she rejected the offer to be her father's successor.  So instead, she ends up extorting it from him instead.

All completely illegal, of course, but it fits with the approach Bollers has taken to Emma.  She's still almost entirely a sympathetic character, but her willingness to go along with schemes like this and her more questionable uses of telepathy put her on the slippery slope.  It's nice to see Bollers being relatively subtle about it in the early stages, though.

This issue, however, Adrienne's subplot may be of more interest.  After the first arc, I was left rather confused by the way Adrienne was written - she seemed to have the sketchy outline of a character arc, which never really went anywhere before Emma walked out on the family.  Now that the family has been brought back in, things start to make a little more sense.  Adrienne spent the first arc trying to suck up to her father and inherit the family business.  Having been rejected on that score, she's now taking a rather different approach.

Adrienne kicks off the issue by selling the hoax ransom tape to the media, despite the fact that the kidnappers claim Emma will be killed if that happens.  The interesting point is quite why she would do that, other than cash.  A neat touch in this story is that Bollers has never yet explained quite what Adrienne's power is.  Readers of Generation X already know - she can read the history of an object by touching it.  This series has never made it clear, not because of poor exposition, but because the series is written from Emma's point of view, and she doesn't know yet.  The story has been rather cleverly written to work both ways, whether or not you know what Adrienne's powers are.

It's hugely significant to this story, because if you know what Adrienne's powers are, it follows that she knows the tape is a hoax.  She'd have learned that the moment she picked up the tape.  So, contrary to appearances, she's not really trying to put Emma's life at risk - she's justifiably confident that nothing will happen.  But why sell the tape to the media?  Is it just to get the cash, or is she positively setting out to undermine her father and force him to pay the ransom?

Karl Bollers has really been quite clever in the way he's played this story.  Of course, some readers won't get the full point until the series gets around to explaining Adrienne's powers, but that's fine - it works without that knowledge, and it'll stand up to re-reading.

I'm really starting to like this title.  It's a consistent series which is cleverer than it first appears.

Rating: A-

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