The Morrison Years
Moving ahead to the early 2000s, and Emma Frost’s story took a surprising twist. Grant Morrison hadn’t originally planned to use the character of Emma Frost at all in his New X-Men run, but some of his original plans were rejected by Marvel. As CBR report, one fan reached out to Morrison via his website, and asked if he’d use Emma Frost. Morrison’s answer?
“I had no plans at all for Emma Frost but now that you mention it, man…”
Emma Frost actually became a central character in Morrison’s run. He drew her back into X-Men circles by having her be the sole survivor of the slaughter on Genosha, and soon developed a ‘romance’ with Cyclops. In Morrison’s view, you see, the relationship between Cyclops and Jean Grey had become stale; even as Morrison developed Jean as a character, taking her powers to ever more godlike extremes, he had Cyclops become increasingly distant from his wife. Cyclops turned to Emma Frost for marriage counselling, and soon the two were participating in a psychic affair.
Morrison’s New X-Men run ended with a vision of the future, with a resurrected Jean realizing that Cyclops’s isolation would cause a dystopian future. Exerting all the power of the Phoenix Force, she willed for Cyclops to be happy, and psychically ‘pushed’ him into Emma Frost’s arms. They wound up embracing over Jean Grey’s grave.
It’s important to understand that, to Morrison, this was a matter of symbolism as much as anything. Jean Grey represented the old, familiar X-Men of the past; Emma Frost represented the shades-of-grey, darker X-Men of the future. To Morrison, Cyclops’s choice was a symbolic declaration that the X-Men franchise as a whole should choose life, evolution, and change.
But note one subtle detail. Not only had Emma Frost’s entire character arc in Generation X been forgotten by Morrison, but he was no longer developing Emma Frost as a teacher. Now, he’d begun a trend of defining Emma Frost in a very different way – by her relationships.
