{"id":4375,"date":"2018-11-08T23:07:13","date_gmt":"2018-11-08T23:07:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=4375"},"modified":"2018-11-08T23:07:13","modified_gmt":"2018-11-08T23:07:13","slug":"x-men-black-emma-frost","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=4375","title":{"rendered":"X-Men: Black – Emma Frost"},"content":{"rendered":"

X-Men: Black<\/em> has been a strange little set of one-shots. \u00a0The\u00a0Magneto<\/em>,\u00a0Mojo<\/em> and\u00a0Mystique<\/em> stories were mainly just restatements of the characters. \u00a0But\u00a0Juggernaut<\/em> seemed to be setting up a new status quo for the character (if not an especially interesting one).<\/p>\n

And now we have\u00a0Emma Frost<\/em>‘s one-shot, written by Leah Williams and pencilled by Chris Bachalo (with six inkers, so the deadlines must have been pressing on this one). \u00a0This one is actually important to the plot.<\/p>\n

As a character, Emma has been drifting since she was returned to being an outright villain, for no especially compelling reason beyond selling the importance of\u00a0X-Men vs. Inhumans<\/em>. \u00a0If it’s meant to play as some sort of reaction on her part to losing Scott, well, it hasn’t really come across that way; it’s just felt like the character has regressed and nobody really has much of an idea of what to do with her next. \u00a0Sometimes people try to nudge her back towards the X-Men, sometimes she’s a vaguely conflicted villain, none of it really amounts to much.<\/p>\n

So this story at least gets points for taking that problem by the horns and committing to, well, something or other.<\/p>\n

Emma approaches the X-Men to tell them that the Hellfire Club have been behind all of mutantkind’s problems over the last few years, and that since Sebastian Shaw is still recovering from the Mothervine storyline in\u00a0X-Men Blue<\/em>, this is a perfectly opportunity to take the whole enterprise down for good. \u00a0The X-Men are slightly sceptical but sign on, and wind up going after the footsoldiers while Emma takes on Shaw herself.<\/p>\n

You can probably figure out where all this is going. \u00a0Emma is indeed out to take down Shaw, but only with a view to replacing him as the new leader of the Hellfire Club. \u00a0That’s the new status quo: she’s running the Hellfire Club, as the new Black King.<\/p>\n

And it’s rather well done. \u00a0Chris Bachalo is a very talented artist, but at times his work suffers from inventiveness at the expense of intelligibility. \u00a0That’s not a problem here, as he deadpans his way rather nicely through an opening scene of the X-Men meeting Emma “unobtrusively” in a Walmart; it’s a sequence that makes great use of the incongruity of the utterly bland setting to liven up what could otherwise have been a dull exposition segment.<\/p>\n

Emma herself seems more clearly in character than she has done for a while. \u00a0Williams and Bachalo both hit all the key notes. \u00a0Emma is vaguely disdainful of the X-Men, and simultaneously sincere and manipulative in trying to enlist their help. \u00a0There’s a four-page sequence of Emma simply walking impassively through the Shaw Industries offices and using her telepathy to send the staff into chaos all around her, or turning to diamond to shrug off the security measures, which is both inventive, and sells Emma as quietly unstoppable. \u00a0Shaw is a one-note sadist, but that’s his role here, and it’s not like he’s ever been a deep character; Emma goes out of her way to point out that he first encountered her as a stripper and made her a consort – and, hey, look how that worked out for both of them.<\/p>\n

There are problems with this issue, but they’re really part and parcel of the problems that the story is trying to address. \u00a0The Hellfire Club has been a bit of a rotating cast of short-lived leaders for years now, and Sebastian Shaw hasn’t been even a B-list villain for years, while Emma has spent ten or twenty years now in the X-books’ top flight. \u00a0This story would very much prefer that we ignored all that and run with the idea that this is a changing of the guard for the Hellfire Club.<\/p>\n

But, perhaps because it’s Emma, there is more of a sense of permanence here. \u00a0When she was in the Hellfire Club, even though she had more of the star quality, she was ostensibly playing second fiddle to Sebastian Shaw; if she’s not going to be in the X-Men, there’s something quite satisfying about seeing her take his role for herself. \u00a0Rebranding her as the Black King is a\u00a0little<\/em> odd, in as much as it explicitly echoes the character she replaced, and Emma is not what you would call a notably androgynous character, but it certainly sends the signal that she’s supplanted him and taken on that role for the first time.<\/p>\n

As for what she’s actually going to do as the leader of the Hellfire Club, that’s decidedly ambiguous. \u00a0We’re led to understand that she genuinely thinks Shaw has been using the Club’s resources both to exploit other mutants, and simply to indulge his own fantasies; the Club under Emma is presumably going to have a rather different agenda. \u00a0The implication is that this version of the Hellfire Club is not going to be evil so much as a unreliable and unpredictable competitor for the X-Men.<\/p>\n

Of course, much depends on what future writers actually do with Emma. \u00a0But this is a potentially interesting role for her, and it feels like something that could work.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

X-Men: Black has been a strange little set of one-shots. \u00a0The\u00a0Magneto,\u00a0Mojo and\u00a0Mystique stories were mainly just restatements of the characters. \u00a0But\u00a0Juggernaut seemed to be setting up a new status quo for the character (if not an especially interesting one). And now we have\u00a0Emma Frost‘s one-shot, written by Leah Williams and pencilled by Chris Bachalo (with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4375","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-x-axis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4375","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4375"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4375\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4376,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4375\/revisions\/4376"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4375"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4375"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4375"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}