Emma Frost gets cancelled with issue #18 - an interesting move, because it wasn't a complete sales disaster, and it was tied in to the Marvel Age digest programme.  You'd have thought that would buy it a bit of leeway, but apparently not.

Don't be fooled by the White Queen costume on the cover; we're still nowhere near that part of Emma's life.  By the way, the cover is a bit of a mess by Greg Horn's standards.  Reflections in windows are evidently a weak spot for him.

Instead, this is the final part of "Bloom", charting Emma's first few weeks at university.  As you might expect, simply by working through the characters and applying a process of elimination, Astrid Bloom turns out to be the villain behind everything.  To be fair, she also turns out to be responsible for making that dopey jock attack Emma a few issues back, in a scene which I criticised for being awkward.  Apparently that was intentional, since it was meant to be a clue that something was up.  Fair enough; actually, I kind of like it now, since it was just plausible enough to let the reader think, "Well, Emma didn't spot it either..."

I suspect that the original plan for this arc was to give Emma greater control over her powers.  Perhaps because it's the final issue of the series, it also ends up trying to justify Emma turning her back on the human race and signing up for villainy, by having everyone reject her by the end of the story.  This would have worked as a springboard into the next storyline, but feels rushed when Emma has to end the series with an "Astrid was right" internal monologue.

I know I keep saying that the line needs an axe taken to it.  And to be fair, Mystique, NYX, Jubilee and X-Force also have end dates in sight, with no new titles presently on the horizon.  It's a start.  But Emma Frost and Mystique wouldn't be on that list, in an ideal world.  This isn't the best comic ever written, but it's made a genuine attempt to break from the mould and produce a weird title that never seemed quite sure what genre it was trying to be a part of.  It was something different, and Karl Bollers actually seemed to have a story he wanted to tell about the development of Emma's character. 

You could never say the X-books needed an ongoing title devoted to Emma Frost: The Early Years; it was always an oddball side project, viewed in the context of the line.  But it made a remarkably good showing for itself, all things considered.  I'm going to miss this one.

Rating: B

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