Avengers: Doomsday isn’t even out, but we’re already getting news of what’s coming next for the Marvel Cinematic Universe. On July 31, Deadline reported that Samara Weaving has been cast as Emma Frost in its forthcoming reboot of the X-Men film franchise, and more mutant casting news has since followed.
That leads naturally to the question of whether Weaving’s Frost is planned as an antagonist, an ally, or somewhere in between. Since she’s apparently playing a significant role in the next era of the MCU, now’s as good a time as any to take a look back at Emma’s history in the comics, how she evolved from a villain of the week to a front-line member of the X-Men, and how that differs from her history in Fox’s X-Men films.
It’s worth noting that this is meant as a brief summary for newcomers to the comics, rather than an extensive dossier; we’re going to gloss over a few things for the sake of brevity, most prominently Emma’s “daughters” the Stepford Cuckoos. If you’re interested in reading Emma’s story for yourself, all of her most crucial appearances, especially Grant Morrison’s run on New X-Men, are available digitally via Marvel Unlimited.
The origins of Emma Frost
The comics’ Emma Frost first appeared in Uncanny X-Men v1 #129 (1979), which is also the first appearance of Kitty Pryde, Sebastian Shaw, and Marvel’s Hellfire Club. The latter is a secret society in New York whose membership is limited to the “phenomenally, almost impossibly rich,” with a governing Inner Circle that names its ranks after chess pieces.
(Funny story: the Hellfire Club from Stranger Things is named after Marvel’s version, which itself is named after an organization from a 1966 episode of the UK TV show The Avengers… which had named its fictional club after a series of real-world 18th-century secret societies. It’s not a circle; it’s a spiral.)
Emma was born in Boston as one of four children of Winston Frost, an old-money billionaire, and his wife Hazel. Winston was deeply abusive towards all of his children. As a kid, Emma was shy, withdrawn, and dreamed of becoming a teacher.
All four of Winston Frost’s children turned out to be mutants, and Emma’s powers of telepathy eventually manifested as an angry outburst that knocked everyone in her boarding school unconscious. That brought Emma to the attention of Charles Xavier, in the days before he’d formed the X-Men, but Emma and her father turned down Xavier’s invitation to attend his school. (If Emma had changed her mind and become one of the first X-Men, that would make an interesting What If?)
Instead, now that she understood she had powers, Emma ran away from her father’s house. After a brief attempt at college, Emma dyed her hair blonde, got cosmetic surgery, and ended up working as a stripper in New York City. She eventually took a job to dance at the Hellfire Club, which was where she met Shaw, a mutant like herself. Shaw and Emma teamed up on the spot and took over the Hellfire Club, appointing themselves as its Black King and White Queen.
The White Queen
The Hellfire Club’s members adopted archaic costumes to signify their rejection of modern morality. As Shaw puts it in New Mutants v1 #22, “Society—the common herd—means nothing, the individual all.” Imagine the cast of Atlas Shrugged dressed up in Revolutionary War cosplay and that’s more or less the comics’ Hellfire Club.
Given that philosophy, Shaw felt comfortable regarding other mutants as a resource to be exploited, rather than actual people. His goal was to recruit as many mutants as possible, ideally young ones, to serve as his minions.
That meant the X-Men were in Shaw’s way, and he sent Emma to either recruit or eliminate them. When several of the X-Men came to Chicago to meet Kitty Pryde, whose powers had just manifested, Emma attacked with a squad of high-powered mercenaries. While she won the first round against the X-Men, Emma subsequently came out second best in a telepathic duel against Phoenix, and was briefly assumed to have died.
Emma’s Mutant Academy
Emma later resurfaced as the headmaster of a school of her own, the Massachusetts Academy, which she’d talked Shaw into funding. There, she trained her own team of young mutants, who she called the Hellions, and occasionally tried to poach students from Xavier’s school.
That came to an abrupt end when the Hellfire Club came under attack from the time-traveler Trevor Fitzroy, who killed most of the Hellions. Emma herself nearly died, but spent the next year in a coma.
Emma woke up eventually, but then had to help deal with an invasion by the alien Phalanx, who had a plan to attack the next generation of mutants. After helping rescue them, Emma reopened the Massachusetts Academy as a new branch of Xavier’s school, which was the setting of the ‘90s comic Generation X. (That comic eventually became the basis of a 1996 TV movie, with General Hospital’s Finola Hughes as Emma.)
Following the closure of the Academy, Emma moved to the newly-founded mutant nation of Genosha and went to work as a teacher for young telepaths. She was in the middle of class when a new kind of Sentinel overran Genosha. The only reason Emma survived was her sudden development of a secondary mutation, which allowed her to transform her body into organic diamond.
(Later adaptations, such as X-Men: First Class and Marvel Rivals, have made Emma’s diamond form a core part of her kit and/or available to her from the start. It can be a surprise to new readers to find that Emma didn’t always have it.)
Out of a desire to find and murder whoever was responsible for the Genosha attack, Emma joined the Xavier Institute to serve as both a member of the X-Men and a teacher at the school. She even ended up in a relationship with Scott Summers for the better part of 20 years in real time, although that seems to have quietly ended at some point right before the Krakoan era of X-Men.
Emma Frost in the X-Men movies
Emma Frost’s history in the X-Men film universe is shorter and begins significantly earlier, in X-Men: First Class. The biggest point of divergence might be that she meets Shaw before she ever even hears of Xavier, and immediately buys into Shaw’s argument of mutant supremacy.
By 1962, Emma is all in on Shaw’s plan to start World War III as a way to usher in mutant supremacy. After Shaw’s death, Emma is subsequently recruited by Magneto for his Brotherhood. Unfortunately for Emma, it’s established in the next movie, Days of Future Past, that she was killed the following year, likely by Bolivar Trask.
The biggest difference between the films’ take on Emma and her portrayal in the comics is that in the latter case, Emma is a teacher before she’s anything else. While she spent her share of time as a cackling supervillain, Emma consistently has a soft spot for kids, and the loss of her Hellions is explicitly what started her towards her eventual turn towards antiheroism. There’s no sign of that character trait in the Fox movies, where Emma is a straightforward mutant supremacist with a talent for manipulation.
That makes Emma Frost into an effective wild card for the MCU. Given the franchise’s established love of evil counterparts, Emma works well opposite Xavier as both a teacher and a ruthless telepath. She’s also been a member of Magneto’s Brotherhood in more than one continuity, such as the 1992 Konami arcade game, so she could also be a straightforward villain.
The funniest option, which means it isn’t what the MCU will go for, has to do with how the only characters who’ve been cast so far are Scott, Jean, and Emma. As readers of the Morrison run are aware, those characters were the participants in one of Western comics’ most bizarre love triangles, featuring telepathic adultery, cosplay seductions, and eventually, time travel to save the past from the future.
Frankly, that’s the kind of nonsense that the movies could use. After multiple accusations that the MCU is too reliant on its own particular formula, what could possibly break its established patterns more dramatically than making the X-Men’s MCU debut into Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice in blue and yellow spandex?