3/7 · Emma Frost · White Queen

3/7 · Emma Frost · White Queen Emma Frost arrives with a school to offer and an agenda she has no intention of explaining to Kitty Pryde's family. The Massachusetts Academy gives the White Queen a respectable reason to seek out a young mutant. Her conduct toward the X-Men shows what happens when that recruitment effort meets resistance. Emma is a telepath, and her treatment of the captive Storm makes the danger personal. She can reach someone the guards have already restrained and keep hurting them where those restraints offer no protection. When Phoenix comes for her in X-Men #131, the confrontation moves onto ground Emma expects to command. Her defeat does not remove her influence from the rest of the story. The device that helps Wyngarde get inside Jean's mind is Emma's design. Her technical work connects the opening conflict over Kitty to the much larger disaster that follows. Emma is one of my favorite villains, even though she's not always a villain. Really, she's one of my favorite characters. I think of her as almost a mirror to Jean Grey in some ways, and there's a lot of history behind that comparison. Seeing the two face each other this early gives that relationship a different weight when you go back to it. The early White Queen is frightening because she has resources and is perfectly willing to use them against people with less power. A school, a company, hired troops and mental abilities all serve the same interests. Her polished introduction to Kitty's parents belongs to the same woman who threatens Storm in a laboratory. There is no reassuring separation between those two sides of her life.