Emma Frost appears to be getting axed after issue #18, although in typical style, Marvel haven't actually announced a cancellation, so much as just stopped soliciting it.  I'm not sure quite what they think that policy achieves, but whatever.

Anyhow, that means this is the penultimate issue of the series.  So we're never going to get to any of the stuff about Emma getting involved with the Hellfire Club, or anything like that.  Instead, we have three odd little storylines which seem to be leaning generally towards being a romance book - although the middle one seemed to think it was a thriller.  It's actually quite a decent little book, but its perpetual genre shifting, and the ludicrous contrast between the early covers, the content of the book, and the eventual decision to market it to children and young teens, speaks to utter confusion within Marvel about quite why they were publishing this book, and who it was supposed to be for.

At the moment, at least, it seems to have a clear idea - it's a teen romance book.  Greg Horn even turns in a Mills & Boon-style cover to match.  Telepathy provides a twist on the formula, with the old standard device of querying how Emma can trust anyone's feelings about her when she's in a position to control them.  In fact, it's a red herring - if anything, it's Astrid influencing the other characters, and being set up as the villain of the piece.  The idea seems to be that Astrid wants rid of Ian the Love Interest so that she can have Emma to herself.  It's perfectly alright, but the romance with Ian is one of the book's less compelling and convincing aspects.  He's a bit of a non-character, really.  Still, the odd hybrid of adding Emma's powers into the storyline makes it rather more interesting than it perhaps deserves. 

I can't help but feel that this is going to read very strangely as the final arc of the series, and it's a shame that the book isn't going to get any further into the character's history.  On the other hand, they're in a double bind - the romance genre which they've chosen to pursue in this title isn't really compatible with the premise of the book, which would have led to Emma becoming a dangerous supervillain and prancing around in corsets.  The "slippery slope" approach Karl Bollers has taken to Emma's character has been largely effective, but it's hard to see how the book could have continued to walk that line once she slipped into outright villainy.  Then again, perhaps the sheer genre-busting weirdness of the whole thing would have produced something memorably unique.

We'll never know, I guess.

Rating: B

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