{"id":11937,"date":"2026-04-15T23:17:17","date_gmt":"2026-04-15T22:17:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=11937"},"modified":"2026-04-15T23:17:17","modified_gmt":"2026-04-15T22:17:17","slug":"x-men-united-2-annotations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=11937","title":{"rendered":"X-Men United #2 annotations"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>X-MEN UNITED #2<\/strong>
\n“Open Wounds”<\/strong>
\nWriter: Eve L Ewing<\/strong>
\nArtist: Tiago Palma<\/strong>
\nColour artist: Brian Reber<\/strong>
\nLetterer: Joe Sabino<\/strong>
\nEditor: Tom Brevoort<\/strong><\/p>\n

COVER:<\/strong> Captain America, Mel\u00e9e, Wolverine (Laura), Beast and Kitty Pryde in a World War II setting. Not a scene from the issue.<\/p>\n

THE X-MEN:<\/strong><\/p>\n

This issue is no clearer about the nature of Graymatter Lane than the previous one was. Once again, it’s reiterated that Graymatter Lane is on the psychic plane and that if you die there then you die “in real life”, which makes it sound like it’s a projection; and once again, people seem to be able to travel from there directly to places in the real world. There’s a dining pavilion – does it serve real food or just illusions? On balance Graymatter Lane seems<\/em> to be a pocket of the psychic plane that people physically travel to, even though most of the environment being a psychic projection… but I’m honestly unsure what the intention is.<\/p>\n

Cyclops.\u00a0<\/strong>His plan was apparently to get Kid Omega to fake an attack on the school in the expectation that it wouldn’t be able to cope, thus proving his point that it was a bad idea. This plan fails spectacularly, but Scott refuses to concede that this has gone badly, or that he ought to have warned Ben, and simply acts as if things had gone to plan. Iceman seems to regard this refusal to apologise as entirely in character.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Kid Omega.\u00a0<\/strong>He claims that Cyclops goaded him into helping with this plan by presenting it as an opportunity to show up Emma. However, for some reason he makes his move when almost nobody is in the building (other than Ben Liu), meaning that it goes practically unnoticed by everyone except Emma. You have to wonder whether he was even seriously trying, though he makes a show of winding up both Emma and Scott. Emma has no apparent difficulty subduing him, though he\u00a0is<\/em> in an area of her own creation.<\/p>\n

Emma Frost.\u00a0<\/strong>She sees right through Cyclops’ plan, and understandably annoyed by it. She claims that his real objection to the school is that he doesn’t trust her, though that would seem very out of character for him, given how long she’s had a role in teaching for the X-Men. In this story, though, they seem to have fallen out quite badly.<\/p>\n

She’s offered the X-Men’s services to Captain America to locate survivors of experiments to re-create the Super-Soldier Serum (see below). She hasn’t discussed it with anyone else, but argues that it will be good practice for some students, and means that Cap will owe them a favour in future.\u00a0A passing comment later in the issue suggests that she’s also hoping Cap will “learn something” that might make him more sympathetic to mutant interests. It’s unlikely that this would simply be the fact of the government experiments on black soldiers, since he already knows about them. It may be that she has a more precise expectation of what he’s going to encounter than she lets on, but we’ll come to that.<\/p>\n

She brushes off concerns about the privacy implications of using the Empathy Engine to locate survivors for Cap, pointing out (correctly) that this would also be an objection to using the Engine for anyone at all.<\/p>\n

Kitty Pryde.\u00a0<\/strong>She’s still wondering about whether the school is a bad idea because of the risk of infiltration, the implication being that mutants ought to avoid large gatherings altogether. She’s uncertain about whether to help Cap or not, and ultimately dithers and abstains.<\/p>\n

Prodigy. <\/strong>Naturally enough, he’s in favour of mutant institutions (presumably the NYX community centre is still out there?). He argues that the idea that neither option is truly safe and gathering together allows mutants to make the best world they can.<\/p>\n

He’s persuaded to help Cap, not so much for Emma’s realpolitik reasons, but because he buys into the value of the exercise and accepts her answer to his objections about privacy. He makes it fairly clear that, as a black character, he is unimpressed by the argument that this is not a mutant issue.<\/p>\n

Iceman.\u00a0<\/strong>Not remotely interested in offering mutant resources to help with a non-mutant problem.<\/p>\n

Magneto.\u00a0<\/strong>He regard’s Cap’s proposal as a waste of time, and indeed as something intended more to assuage his own feelings of guilt than to actually do any good for the survivors.<\/p>\n

Wolverine<\/strong> (Laura Kinney). She’s assigned to help Cap on the reasonable basis that her back story as a creation of the Facility gives her a personal interest in any event involving dodgy experiments to create human weapons.<\/p>\n

Beast.\u00a0<\/strong>His rather garbled plan is to use the Empathy Engine to identify survivors of the experiments by scanning the memories of World War II veterans collectively and seeing what picture emerges by consensus. Axo makes clear that he’s vastly overstating the reliability of this method. Nonetheless, it does apparently succeed in locating Maurice Canfield.<\/p>\n

Gambit, Rogue, Nightcrawler, Magik<\/strong> and Wolverine <\/strong>(Logan)\u00a0all cameo in the dining pavilion.<\/p>\n

GUEST STAR:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Captain America. <\/strong>This is the Steve Rogers version. Much of this story is based on the 2003 miniseries\u00a0Truth: Red White & Black<\/em>, in which 300 black soldiers were experimented on in an attempt to replicate Captain America’s Super-Soldier Serum. The events of that series have been brought back to Cap’s mind by someone anonymously sending him an obituary of one of the men, Francis Maclean. The suggestion seems to be that this has brought home to him that others might still be alive – though presumably not for long, since if they were old enough to enlist during World War II, they would be at least approaching 100 today. In the absence of any records, he wants the X-Men to use the Empathy Engine (which is supposed to be for locating mutant students) to help him track down the survivors. Emma has put this idea in mind.<\/p>\n

STUDENT MENTORS:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Mel\u00e9e.\u00a0<\/strong>She’s assigned to help Cap for “stealth”, which is not a quality she’s conspicuously demonstrated in\u00a0Exceptional X-Men<\/em> so far – nor, for that matter, a quality obviously required for the exercise of tracking down some ageing survivors in order that Cap can have a nice sit down and a cup of tea with them. Somewhat more plausibly, it’s suggested that she would have an interest in the job because of the way the Bureau of Indian Affairs moved her family to Chicago in the 1950s. The fact that she’s half Potawatomi was previously mentioned in\u00a0Exceptional X-Men<\/em> #3; I don’t think the Bureau has come up before, but there was indeed a programme of relocations to Chicago<\/a> at that time.<\/p>\n

She’s completely dismissive about the reliability of government records.<\/p>\n

Axo.\u00a0<\/strong>Helps use the Empathy Engine to locate Maurice Canfield, despite his obvious doubts about the method.<\/p>\n

Rift.\u00a0<\/strong>Shows up to open a portal to Canfield’s location. Presumably he just defines the destination as “wherever the Empathy Engine identified”, because the Engine itself turns out to be pointing to the same location at four different points in time: 1946, 1968 (specifically, the day of Martin Luther King’s assassination), 1987 (the day of Reagan’s “tear down this wall” speech at the Brandenburg Gate) and an unspecified time frame.<\/p>\n

STUDENTS:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Ben Liu.\u00a0<\/strong>Somehow he gets separated from everyone else and, as a result, is the only mutant to actually get caught in the fire illusion while believing it to be real. He’s understandably annoyed.<\/p>\n

Jitter.\u00a0<\/strong>On loan from\u00a0Uncanny X-Men<\/em>, she’s assigned to help Cap on the grounds that she’s a “nice wild card for the unexpected, and could use the practice”. The issue doesn’t actually explain what her powers are (basically, she can acquire any skill she wants for 60 seconds).<\/p>\n

VILLAINS:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Maurice Canfield. <\/strong>Canfield isn’t a new character – he was one of the handful of experimental subjects from\u00a0Truth: Red White & Blue\u00a0<\/em>who actually made it into the field.\u00a0Steve has heard of him before, and understands him to be a “society fellow, upper crust”, “smart” and “political”. All of that is basically correct, though it’s not clear whether Steve actually appreciates quite how socialist Maurice was; he wound up in the army after being convicted of protesting against US involvement in World War II. In Truth<\/em> #4, Canfield learns that his parents were falsely told that he was dead, after which his father killed his mother and committed suicide. Canfield then gets into a fight in which he apparently dies.<\/p>\n

We see the 1946 and 2026 versions of Canfield, but not the versions from 1968 and 1987. In 1946, he seems quite genial and politely welcomes the group (three of whom then vanish to other timeframes). He may be expecting them. His home seems in decent shape in the first three time frames, but looks abandoned and dilapidated in 2026. Truth<\/em> #1 gives his age in 1940 as 25, implying that he should now be over 110 years old. That suggests that the final time frame which we see in the story is still in the past, or simply that his version of the super-soldier serum slowed his ageing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

X-MEN UNITED #2 “Open Wounds” Writer: Eve L Ewing Artist: Tiago Palma Colour artist: Brian Reber Letterer: Joe Sabino Editor: Tom Brevoort COVER: Captain America, Mel\u00e9e, Wolverine (Laura), Beast and Kitty Pryde in a World War II setting. Not a scene from the issue. THE X-MEN: This issue is no clearer about the nature of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11937","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-annotations"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11937","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11937"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11937\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11939,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11937\/revisions\/11939"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11937"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11937"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11937"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}