Emma Frost wraps up its second storyline, and the cover gives you a pretty good idea of where we're heading here.

Emma's been drawn into a rather ill-conceived plan to extort money from her parents by posing as a hostage.  It's all gone a bit off the rails, as her captors have twigged that they'd make a lot more money by just holding her hostage and making a genuine ransom demand.   Naturally, this is the issue where Emma outwits everyone, escapes and makes off with the money for herself, giving her the start in life that's necessary for the book's next phase.

The henchmen have been fairly sketchily characterised in this storyline, but Bollers has done enough to lay the groundwork so that it works when Emma turns them against one another.  And then he reaches for the Tarantino playbook and has them all shoot one another.  This could easily come across as enormously contrived, but surprisingly enough, it works.  Emma's powers have been played quite subtly here - she's much easier to work with as a low-grade telepath who's genuinely in danger and can't do much more than nudge people a bit.  But it still provides enough to let otherwise contrived stories hang together and give Emma the necessary credit for getting out on her own initiative.

I used to regard this title as pleasantly readable but rather superfluous.  But I'm coming round to the view that there really is a place for it in the line.  Rather than ploughing at high speed through Emma's origin, we're getting a more leisurely drift through her early years.  Even if it doesn't have a huge bearing on what the character is doing in the present day, this version of Emma is interesting in her own right.

I can't help noticing that this arc was originally solicited under the name "Hellfire", a title which bears no relationship whatsoever to the plot.  One wonders whether there's been a change of plan to spend more time on Emma's pre-villainy career, given the generally favourable reviews and the decision to market the book in digest format.  It's also interesting that, at around the same time, Greg Horn's covers changed from awful T&A to rather more sensible affairs (one of which, for issue #8, was a retroactive cover for the first arc and has indeed subsequently turned up as the cover of the first digest). 

This title once seemed uncertain whether it was trying primarily to pursue the bookstore audience or pander to fanboys.  It seems to have chosen the former option, and it's all the better for doing so.  In fact, it's now one of the X-titles I most look forward to reading each month, which seemed unthinkable when it was first announced.

Rating: A-

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