Emma Frost #7 begins the second storyline, which was originally solicited as "Hellfire" but has now turned into "Mind Games."  In fact, this issue has nothing to do with the Hellfire Club, so perhaps Marvel thought it was a bit of a giveaway about where the story is heading.

Emma's still in Boston, trying to make ends meet after walking out on the family at the end of the previous arc.  Unfortunately, despite having a perfectly good education, she's got no practical experience of anything at all.  And she's incapable of being subservient enough for the sort of jobs she can get.  Which, now I come to think about it, is a little odd considering that she spent most of the first arc as a mouse.  Evidently, now that she's discovered her self-esteem, she's no longer capable of playing along with obnoxious customers.

Anyway, Emma meets up with dishwasher Troy Kilkelly, and in the way of such stories, Troy's heavily in debt.  So it's up to Emma to help him out, because he's nice, and besides, he's offering her somewhere to stay.  You get the general idea.

It's fairly obvious territory, but reasonably well written.  Writer Karl Bollers seems to be setting up the situation so that Emma finds herself justifying increasingly questionable uses of her telepathy on the basis of necessity.  So in the background we've still got the slippery slope theme which is presumably going to come increasingly to the foreground - after all, at some point the character has to join the Hellfire Club and become a supervillain, and that's going to involve a drastic change from the way she's been depicted thus far.

Carlo Pagulayan comes aboard to replace Randy Green as artist.  He did some good work on Greg Rucka's Elektra a while back, and I'm pleased to see the quality holding up here.  His character design for Emma looks a little more conventionally attractive than Randy Green's, but then Green was drawing her as a gawky schoolgirl, and Pagulayan has her as a young woman.  More importantly, the interior art is still not sexualising the character, which is the usual curse of female-led books.

Of course, there's still those dreadful covers to contend with - this issue, Greg Horn bafflingly gives us the adult Emma huddled next to a brazier, trying to look simultaneously sexy and poverty-stricken.  It's truly awful.  I see from the solicitations that this is the last cover we're getting in this vein - future issues have covers that match the young Emma seen in the interior art, and it's a vast improvement.  Somebody must have seen the light.

As we've come to expect from Emma Frost, it's solid stuff, even though it won't blow you away.  A little obvious, perhaps, but then Bollers is stuck with the general direction laid down by earlier writers.

Rating: B+

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