Emma Frost: White Queen #2 // Review
Ms. Frost is meeting with the rest of the inner circle. There’s been a bit of an issue in Buenos Aires. The X-Men had crashed a little soiree there and absconded with a young mutant. There was no reason why the heroes should have even known about the event. So why was it so easy for them to arrive and make a mockery of her security? Ms. Frost has a lot of explaining to do in Emma Frost: White Queen #2. Writer Amy Chu continues a fun, little between-the-issues exploration of Emma Frost in the 1980s with artist Andrea Di Vito and colorist Antonio Fabela.
The X-Men were in and out of the party in less than ten minutes. The video footage from the surveillance cameras can attest to that much. There was no psychic with them who would have been able to scan minds to know the layout of the place and there was no indicator that they’d ever been there. So naturally the only way that would have been able to get through that space as quickly as they did was via some sort of mole within the Hellfire Club who would have allowed them the opportunity to work efficiently. The only question is: who was it?
Chu delivers a fun tale told around the edges of the stories Christ Claremont would have been writing in the X-Men comic book in the early 1980s. He’d covered a hell of a lot of ground, but a world of superhuman mutants has room for a lot of potential all over the world. In the second issue, Chu takes Emma to Rome to an underground mutant fight club beneath the ruins of the coliseum. It’s a fun journey that suggests a much bigger world with many more secrets that Claremont would have been capable of exploring in a single monthly title back in the early 1980s. It’s delicious fun.
Di Vito delivers the action with clean-line precision. Emma is beautiful and poised throughout the issue as she investigates a situation which may very well mean her life if she’s not careful. The precision of the backgrounds works perfectly well in the posh spaces that are the title character’s natural habitat. They feel a bit too clean and crisp when she finds her way into a shadowy underground lair beneath Rome. Overall, however, the visuals of the issue are a perfect match for Chu’s script.
Chu has fun with the closing letter...a fun, little casually mind-bending bit of text delivered entirely as a letter to the reader from the title character herself. She’s always been remarkably appealing in a number of different ways. Chu taps into that appeal from an interesting angle in the closing comments from the title character. She’s classy, dominant and a hell of a lot of fun now that she’s had a chance to fully emerge from the first issue of her series. Here’s looking forward to much more from Frost in the future.
