The (Mis)Education of Emma Frost

Emma Frost has gone from a platinum blonde shrew full of hellfire and brimstone to one of the central pillars of the X-Men. But the White Queen isn’t the first hero to be pulled from the ranks of villains; Hawkeye, Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch beat her by years, and DC’s Catwoman has a long history of playing the hero or villain depending on her mood and the day of the week; but Emma is different. As one of the most complex characters in X-history, she’s got a past longer than one might think. Emma’s come a long way from principal of the Hellfire Club to co-Commander-In-Chief of the mutant nation.

As Emma Frost makes her major on-screen debut this week in X-Men: First Class, and promises to play a key role in Marvel’s upcoming X-Men: Schism event series, let’s take a look at the evolution of the character.

Frost Family Values

As told in the mid-00s comic series Emma Frost, the future White Queen was born into money as the second of three daughters (there was also an older brother) in the wealthy Frost family of Boston. Her father Winston Frost cast a domineering shadow over his family, which drove his wife Hazel to prescription abuse and pit his daughters at odds. The only support Emma found was with her brother Christian. Her telepathy first manifested itself in grade school, where she used her powers to cheat on tests but also to tutor her fellow students – a sign of things to come for this enterprising heroine. After her father committed her brother to a mental institution, Emma rejected her father’s offer to be groomed to replace him as head of their family and went out into the world to find her own way.

Mutant U

Using money from a ransom scheme gone wrong (don’t ask), Emma enrolled as a teenager in Empire State University and begins to learn what mutants were. She came under the guidance of a fellow telepath named Astrid, but those strands of mentorship were broken quickly as the catty Astrid was revealed to be behind a series of attacks on Emma perpetrated by potential boyfriends. After a man she was interested in rebuffed her because she was a mutant, Emma turned a cold shoulder on humankind in favor of a militaristic pro-mutant agenda.

From Bottom To Top At The Hellfire Club

After quitting college in a rush, Emma found employment as a stripper in the underground night club run by the Hellfire Club. Once her powers become known, she joined with a group of upstarts including Sebastian Shaw to overthrow the current leadership and put themselves up as the new Inner Circle of the Hellfire Club. It’s here that she first made her presence known in comics in the seminal story-arc beginning in Uncanny X-Men #129  where she is depicted as much being much older before subsequently being de-aged with no apparent explanation (there’s a no-prize there somewhere). It was later revealed in the miniseries X-Men: Deadly Genesis that Professor X approached Emma during his recruitment drive to save the original team for the “All-New, All-Different” X-Men but was rejected quite handily by Frost.

To Hell & Back

As the White Queen, Emma Frost became a key part of the X-Men’s rogues gallery. When the students of New Mutants began to blossom, Frost set up her own rival school called the Massachusetts Academy with her own brand of mutants-in-training named the Hellions. She engaged in a series of volatile recruitment drives versus the New Mutants that was worse than college football recruitment, but all of that came to an end when the Hellions became collateral damage in Bishop's quest to bring down future criminal Trevor Fitzroy. Frost didn’t come out unscathed from the battle, being seriously injured and put into a coma that took her off the chessboard for months.

Redemption Song

After being reawakened from her coma by Professor Xavier, Frost began her path to redemption in the face of her young charges’ death as she teamed with some ancillary X-Men to save a new group of young mutants from the robot horde called Phalanx. This group of young mutants was formalized under the name and title of Generation X, with Frost joining Banshee as the group’s teachers, leaders, and mentors. The series ended up running for a whopping seventy-five issues, with Emma being turned from a full-scale villain into a not-quite-heroic teacher of mutants.

E For Emma

Although she had been part of the extended X-family for years in   Generation X, it wasn’t until Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely inducted her into New X-Men that she truly became what she is today: a full-fledged member of the X-Men. Although Emma’s inclusion on the team was originally done only because Morrison couldn’t get Storm, Frost took to the team like a fish to water, setting up a complicated love triangle between her, Cyclops and Jean Grey that worked as a counter-point to the Logan/Jean/Scott love triangle. The series saw three telepaths working on the X-Men at once with Emma, Professor Xavier and Jean Grey, but by the end of Morrison’s run both Grey and Xavier had left leaving a hole for Frost to fill (and then some).

Testing Her Loyalty

Although she’s been on the side of angels for years, for readers and fellow X-Men Emma Frost is always a hair's breadth away from her villainous past. Kitty Pryde openly called it out in the relaunched Astonishing X-Men run, and it was truly put to the test during the “Torn” arc which saw her own mind turning against her thanks to a evil plot by Cassandra Nova. Frost came out on the other side of it a better person and more deeply entrenched in the X-family, punctuated by her romantic relationship with Scott Summers.  With the mutants' move to the island nation of Utopia she’s become the X-Men's second-in-command, while also going out on her own in adventurous dalliances with Namor, Norman Osborn’s Dark X-Men, and others.