Astonishing X-Men: Bad Girls, Bad Girls—Whatcha gonna do?
By Jeb D.
Marvel Comics has developed many of its superheroines from characters first introduced as villains: Medusa, Black Widow, Scarlet Witch, etc. (there’s a great research paper there). And from her earliest days as the White Queen of the perverse Hellfire Club, Emma Frost was one of the most villainous: a powerful psychic with the air (and costume) of a dominatrix, who quickly became the X-Men’s principal female baddie.
Sometime while I wasn’t looking (i.e., the 90’s), Marvel moved Emma over to the side of the angels (I half suspect it was an artist who figured he would get to draw her more often if she was an X-Man rather than a villain). She was given the lead of a mutant second-team called Generation X (who even managed to appear in a movie before the X-Men did), and became a fixture in the Marvel Universe.
Grant Morrison then took over the flagship X title… and young Mr. Morrison fell in love with the icy blonde in the hot white leathers. He soon had Emma in Xavier’s inner circle, and while Morrison restored some of Emma’s lost “edge” (literally—she developed a “secondary mutation” that can turn her body to diamond), he completed her motivational downgrade: she went from domination and torture to stealing Jean Grey’s man. By the time he was done, although she was still an entertaining character, Emma seemed not so much evil as, well… grouchy.
When Joss Whedon became Morrison’s de facto successor with Astonishing X-Men, one of the first things he did was to remind us of the potency of Emma’s original characterization. He brought Kitty Pryde back to Xavier’s mansion, and Kitty knew from the first that Emma’s presence there was simply wrong. As she reminded us, their first meeting involved Emma kidnapping Kitty and nearly murdering the X-Men. For the first 11 issues of Astonishing X-Men, the Emma-Kitty feud seemed the sort of bad-tempered bickering often used to add spice to a superhero team. Then, with issue 12, Whedon yanked the rug out from under us: Kitty was right, as we saw Emma receiving psychic communication from a reconstituted Hellfire Club.
Now, Astonishing X-Men returns with issue #13, and it would appear that Kitty was even more right than she knew. This issue centers around a meeting between Emma and a Hellfire Club even deadlier than the one she used to run with: the mass-murdering psychic Cassandra Nova is now one of its members. Whedon makes it clear that Emma has been secretly involved with this new Hellfire Club for quite some time, but it’s equally clear that they have been expecting her to exploit the X-Men from within long before this, and the other members of the group are getting impatient waiting for results.
Is Emma a traitor? Double agent? Is all of what we’re shown actually “real” (remember, we’re talking psychics here)? No easy answers yet. Whedon even gives us a classic “hooded villain” called Perfection, who is evidently the eminence grise behind the group, and I’m sure that “her”(?) identity will make for plenty of guessing down the road.
Elsewhere, we get to see Logan “training” some of the younger mutants who survived the recent “Decimation”, and Whedon is one of the few writers who seems to be able get laughs out of Wolverine without making him into a buffoon. Cyclops and Beast swap emotional issues, and Kitty tackles her feelings about Colossus’ return. The dialog is Whedon-sharp, and if he’s not yet in Grant Morrison’s league as a comic writer, he “gets” these characters better than Morrison often did. The issue reaches a quiet climax with Perfection looking deeper into Emma’s heart than even Cassandra Nova can, with results that don’t appear to be reassuring for our blond bombshell.
The John Cassaday/Laura Martin art team turns in their usual stunning job. The contrast to their work on Planetary is apt: Planetary is a book about, well, the “planet”, and the highly-detailed environment is as much a member of the cast as any of the principals. In contrast, of course, X-Men is a soap opera, and just like Days of Our Lives, the facial closeup is the money shot here. And, while the idea is obviously Whedon’s, Cassaday and Martin make that last full-page panel look insanely creepy.
Whedon has said that the first half of this new run of Astonishing X-Men will focus on character pieces, with the action picking up (and dovetailing with the first series) towards the end. The good news, then, is that he’s ensnaring his characters in an intriguing mystery with roots going all the way back to the glory days of Claremont-Byrne; the bad news, of course, is that we don’t appear to have a lot of “fastball specials” in the immediate future. I’d love to see the two aspects better balanced, but the quality of the book is too high for that to be any serious complaint.
THREE AND A HALF OUT OF FIVE VIKINGS
Premesso che non seguo la serie in originale non è che potrebbe essere
