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It's another quiet week for the X-books,
with only two titles. In fact, the backlog is starting
to pile up generally - New Mutants is still struggling
to get back on schedule, Weapon X and Wolverine: The
End are both a month behind, and NYX hasn't shipped
at all since last December. I have a nasty feeling that
we're heading for a month of rushed books in April as Marvel
struggle to clear all this stuff out of the way in preparation
for the Reload books in May.
But sticking with the X-books that have
actually come out, this ends up by default as Emma Frost week.
We'll come in a bit to Emma's introduction in Ultimate
X-Men. Meanwhile, Emma Frost continues the
"Mind Games" storyline, where the pace is starting to flag
just a touch.
Previously, Emma had met up with Troy and
tried to help him out with his debt repayments. Last
month, they went to a casino and won lots of money at poker
through blatant cheating. This month... well, it's kind
of more of the same. The loan shark points out that
Troy's only repaid the principal and still owes another five
thousand dollars in interest. So they go back to the
casino, fail to win any money (because Emma can't get into the
poker game that night, and mind-reading doesn't help with
games of chance) and disaster looms.
All of this is perfectly solid if rather
unimaginative plotting, but it's feeling a little stretched.
This is a six issue storyline, and while it isn't the worst
offender in terms of gratuitous decompression, the pace is a
bit slack. There are probably wider pacing issues why an
entire issue was felt appropriate for this material, but the
practical effect that not very much seems to be happening.
Effectively, the story's just spend an issue cancelling out
most of what was achieved last month.
Carlo Pagulayan and Dennis Crisostomo
largely manage to hold attention with the art.
Pagulayan's version of Emma naturally doesn't bear a great
deal of resemblance to the established character, but sells
Bollers' take on the character rather well - a somewhat naive
figure with increasingly flexible morals who's starting to
wish that that clot Troy would shut up and stop blithering so
much.
It'll probably read okay in the trade, but
the issue is underwhelming on its own.
Rating: B-
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