About Me

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Australian philosopher, literary critic, legal scholar, and professional writer. Based in Newcastle, NSW. My latest books are THE TYRANNY OF OPINION: CONFORMITY AND THE FUTURE OF LIBERALISM (2019); AT THE DAWN OF A GREAT TRANSITION: THE QUESTION OF RADICAL ENHANCEMENT (2021); and HOW WE BECAME POST-LIBERAL: THE RISE AND FALL OF TOLERATION (2024).

Sunday, April 24, 2011

Sunday supervillainy - Emma Frost is not a nice person

This is from an online preview of Uncanny X-Men #536.

Emma Frost may be shacked up with Scott Summers these days - love can take people in strange directions - but she is still a supervillain at heart. Look at her behaviour in this round-table conference after a warship from the militaristic Breakworld enters our solar system and is boarded by a group of X-Men and S.W.O.R.D. agents, including the brown-skinned alien who works for Agent Brand (the woman with the green hair).

The Breakworld folks ask for political asylum on Earth, but can you trust them? This is the same bunch that tried to destroy Earth with a giant bullet during Joss Whedon's legendary run on Astonishing X-Men. (Kitty Pryde was trapped inside the Breakworld space bullet for months of in-universe time until Magneto rescued her as a peace offering to the X-Men.)

In case you can't read it easily, the alien, who speaks in a hissing voice, says, "I can psssychically sssscan them."

Emma: "I can pssssychically sssssscan them too, Sssscott."

Not nice, Emma. Not nice at all.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hmmm. My first thought on this is that it's out of character ... not because of its meanness, but because of its pettiness. Emma Frost at her best is not petty.

If I had to explain it in character, I'd put it down to her manipulating them ... trying to annoy them so that they won't be thinking clearly, giving her the advantage. Being manipulative is definitely in Emma's character, and at least in fiction what she did is a tactic that many manipulative people use to put people off their game.

MosesZD said...

I was looking at some old issues from the 1960s. You know, modern comics are so much better than those. The stories are more mature, better written, better illustrated...

The old comics are like two tin-cans on a string compared to a the modern analog of the iphone...

Russell Blackford said...

Yeah, the old comics had their charm, but the values have certainly changed enormously from the 60s and 70s.