UNCANNY X-MEN #314: Early Frost

Ice to see you again, Emma

Originally Published July 1994

As you may recall, Emma Frost was recently Freaky Fridayed into Bobby Drake's body which she has ice-changed into some kind of extra-pointy genderless misfit form, which is kinda cool. In the interim since last issue, she seems to have escaped the X-Men's infirmary and the mansion altogether. Archangel and Storm give chase, but to no avail.

Emma is convinced that the X-Men are lying about the deaths of all the Hellions, given that the X-Men themselves seem to have come out of that same battle completely unscathed. It stands to reason therefore that at least Beef would have survived. Emma gives her pursuers the slip. Warren and Ororo are like, "I can't even be mad, did you see the way she's already mastered Iceman's abilities?"

Banshee and Xavier call them off, though, as they know where Emma is headed.

Meanwhiles, Bishop is doing a workout in the Danger Room and conversing with an unseen partner who seems to know a thing or two about his time in the XSE...

This is his sister Shard -- or rather a holographic AI recreation of her, painstakingly programmed by Bishop with all his knowledge of the future. Presumably, she can also do your homework and write sitcom scripts.

Is it me or do these two have a kind of a Folgers Commercial thing going on

When Jubilee arrives and asks what-is-the-what with this Holo-Sibling, and why she didn't come back to the past with Bishop, he has a snappy answer that inspires zero follow-up from Jubilation:

At Frost Enterprises in Manhattan, Emma arrives and finds that despite her mastery and innovation of Bobby's powers, there's one facet she can't quite grasp.

So for the time being she's stuck in her Ice-Nonbinary Person form.

Some Frost security people come by to ask what is the deal with the X-Man snooping around (amusingly referring to them mistakenly as a "Mutate") and take exception to being called a Rent-A-Cop. The Temporary-Ownership-Officers open fire on Ice-Emma, but I guess being made of ice comes with certain advantages 

Ice Privilege

Emma continues to skate into the building, icing every security guy she sees, ruminating on how she was training the Hellions to take advantage of every opportunity and molding them in her villainous ways, until she gets to the big computer that lets you know if people are alive or dead.

Even sweet Beef

Emma is distraught as she re-lives how Trevor Fitzroy ate pretty much all of her students. She blames herself for gathering them to act as a villainous paramilitary squad under her auspices.

She considers suicide by cop...

But Xavier arrives to ironically be the one to "freeze" the guards (with his telepathic powers.)

He empathizes with Frost, but she rebuffs him -- how could he possibly know what it's like to lose a student? It's not like any of the X-Men have ever died. And he's like, "Uh... sure."

To be fair, unlike the Hellions, the X-Men have a way of turning out not-so-dead. Except Thunderbird.

Emma goes on and on about how she used her powers and resources to cherry-pick her mutant charges and hide them from Xavier and Magneto and everyone else. She says, "Don't you ever wonder why I had so many young mutants you could never find?" And he doesn't say it but the answer is clearly, "Not really." She concludes that the Hellions would have been better off with Xavier, which is possibly the only time anyone has ever said that.

When Emma is at her lowest, Banshee extends a hand. He tells her that the past is the past, and perhaps they can put it behind them and mould the NeXt Generation of mutants together.

We end on a note of hope, as Xavier looks at the names of the fallen Hellions and promises Never Again, which is a nice thought, but it's not happening.

Further Thoughts:

The art for this issue is by Lee Weeks. Although after only two issues I already miss Joe Madureira's manic take on the team, Weeks is a fine substitute. Ice-Frost is sort of a bizarre creature so taking that design over the top in terms of expression and physique was pretty interesting, combining male and female and inhuman altogether, with nasty-wasty facial expressions and icicle hair. Honestly Weeks is a great artist and the issue looks tremendous, if not quite as stylish as Madureira's work would have.

I think Lobdell does very well with the premise he's set out for himself here, which is the journey of redemption for Emma Frost, from denial to guilt and despair to hope and possible salvation (and of course, the launch of a brand new spin-off.) For a character who has been, essentially, the Wicked Witch for 15 years since her debut, seeing the potential in her as a figure operating on the protagonist's side is pretty visionary.

My main nitpicks are the scenes where Emma has been driven to her wit's end by everything that has happened. There's this curious trend of character going bugnut crazy in Lobdell's comics and it always looks the same, and it particularly seems to happen to the female antagonists that Chris Claremont so carefully introduced (Mystique, Callisto, and now Emma to some degree.) I didn't like it happening once and I really don't like it happening repeatedly. Emma Frost was always -- if you'll pardon the pun (or don't, I don't care) -- a cool customer, whose emotions were best kept hidden, so seeing her wailing away and behaving so erratically -- while not un-earned -- seems like a misread. At the very least, her manic episodes toward the beginning of the issue don't read true: if she had remained calm, cool and collected until learning the true fates of the Hellions, I would have bought it that much more.

This is, I will note, the second time Emma has been in the body of an X-person. Whatever you think of the original story (and its problematic nature due to, you know, racial stuff) I personally felt it fell way short on the concept of "Emma infiltrates the X-Men" which had a lot more potential as a long-term idea but also coild have been done better as the quick two-parter it was. The same pretty much goes for this one: Emma wakes up as Bobby, flips out, and wants to know what's going on. There's no intrigue, no suspense, nothing. The story is virtually the same as if she had woken up as herself and flipped out upon realizing she was a captive of the X-Men, with the minor wrinkle of using powers she was not familiar with. There's a lot of to-do about the nature and level of Bobby's powers, which is worth exploring, I will give you that. I don't want to write it off before it's done playing out, but again -- as someone who loves a body-swapping caper -- I felt it missed out on some special sauce.