Emma Frost continues the "Bloom" storyline, and spend most of issue #15 on establishing Emma's relationship to the titular Astrid Bloom.

Astrid is the first superhuman that Emma's met in the whole series.  It's perhaps a little bit convenient that the first mutant she comes across happens to be another telepath.  The justification for this seems to be that Astrid - a more skilled telepath - sensed Emma in the area and went looking for her.  That goes some way towards smoothing over the gap, but it's still a little bit of a stretch.  Telepaths aren't that thick on the ground, surely?

Anyway, Astrid spends the issue introducing Emma to the world of more impressive telepathy stunts.  Of course, there's really no way to demonstrate these things, or teach Emma, without blatant invasions of everybody else's privacy.  And thus we resume Emma's slippery slope which is eventually taking her to the Hellfire Club and villainy. 

Once again she's doing something which really isn't defensible, but justifying it to herself on a semi-reasonable basis - it's something she needs to do in order to develop her abilities.  It fits neatly with the direction Karl Bollers has established for Emma's moral decline.  She isn't a naturally unpleasant person, but she slips into finding justifications for ethically dodgy things which don't really hurt other people.  Once she adjusts to that, she's on the slippery slope to taking what she wants because the use of her powers no longer bothers her.

Guest art comes from Will Conrad, whose American work has largely been for Dark Horse thus far.  There's a slight style shift from Carlo Pagulayan's work, noticeably in some sporadic shadow and crosshatching on faces which seems to appear and disappear according to taste, but it's generally solid stuff.

Up to the usual solid standard.

Rating: B

back | continue