A load of X-books and a raft of new titles means this is going to be another heavy week. 

Let's kick off with Emma Frost, which has finally acknowledged that those Greg Horn covers were a horrible miscalculation.  It still has Greg Horn covers, but at last they reflect the actual content of the comic.  Okay, so he's given us a picture of a schoolgirl clutching a ring binder, which is about four months behind the plot.  It's still got more to do with the content of the book than those awful sub-porn covers we've had until now.  In fact, as I write this, I wonder whether this is a cover Marvel have commissioned for the trade paperback version of the first story arc.

Last issue, you'll recall, Emma met heavily indebted dishwasher Troy.  Despite them both being penniless, they somehow managed to get evening dress and turned up at a casino at the end of the issue.  Their plan turns out to be rather less drastic than the previous issue suggested: Troy is simply going to gamble for the money.  And the idea, of course, is that Troy is rubbish at poker, whereas Emma, with her telepathy, can breeze through it.

I've seen complaints that Emma's character is getting too contradictory.  At one point she's using her telepathy to win games of poker by fraud; elsewhere, she's refusing to jump the barrier at a train station.  But I think it works.  At this stage in her development, Emma is still basically trying to be moralistic, but she's falling into the habit of regarding her telepathy as a get-out-of-jail-free card.  When her powers are involved, she takes it as a licence to cheat; when they aren't, she clings rigidly to the rules.  It's irrational, but it's believably irrational.

Carlo Pagulayan produces his usual attractive artwork, and gets plenty of good visuals out of a fundamentally rather talky script.  The book is settling into a pleasantly enjoyable rhythm, and it'd be nice to see Marvel try and push this book more in the bookstores - it's really more at home in that market.

Rating: B+

back | continue