It's Christmas!  However, none of this week's comics have anything to do with Christmas, so we'll just plough on as usual.  It's a heavy week for X-books.  Fate has blessed me with two Chuck Austen comics and a hangover.  Blech.

Let's kick off with Emma Frost.  This issue wraps up the first storyline, "Higher Learning".  Greg Horn has chosen to commemorate this event with a rare cover that isn't framed around Emma's tits, and indeed almost squeezes them out of the picture altogether.  It must be a very special occasion indeed.

"Higher Learning" covers the first phase of Emma's back story, leading up to her leaving the family.  This issue brings us up to the recent flashback scene from New X-Men, which seems to be somewhat awkwardly hammered in.  That scene involves Emma's father making a decision between his four children on who should inherit the family fortune.

Of course, this isn't a decision which has figured in the storyline to any significant extent, since Bollers has been much more interested in Emma's relationships with Ian and Christian.  The payoff is that Emma's rebellion against her father's authority in those storylines has led him to see her as his natural heir.  It still comes in from left field, because Emma's never really shown much awareness of this even being an issue.  It's as if the other characters, particularly Adrienne, have been appearing in an entirely separate plotline backstage and think that they're attending the climax of that unseen arc.  If that's intentional, then it's certainly an interesting decision.  I'm not sure it really works, though.

Storylines like this one have the inevitable problem that we all know how they end - the general shape of Emma's future is pretty clearly established in previous stories.  The trick is to make the journey interesting, and Bollers hasn't done too badly in that regard.  His pre-villainy Emma is written as an almost totally different character, but the interest lies in the way she's being set up to turn into the familiar Emma from previous stories.  That undercurrent does make the story rather more interesting than it first appears, as Emma's drift towards questionable ethics has been kept relatively subtle thus far.  The next arc takes us to the Hellfire Club, which should make things a little more explicit.

Despite the covers, at least Randy Green's art has steered well clear of the T&A.  He's not the most striking artist in the world, but he tells the story perfectly well, and he seems fairly comfortable drawing what's effectively a soap opera.  When a bunch of design elements from the New X-Men flashback turn up, they seem a little out of place in Green's rather blander designs.  But the art does the job perfectly well.

Emma Frost seemed like an utterly superfluous project when it was first announced, and it still hasn't persuaded me that it's essential.  But it has turned out to be significantly better than I'd expected - it's made a case for its existence, at least, and I hadn't anticipated it would manage that.

Rating: B+

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