{"id":12017,"date":"2026-05-20T23:12:33","date_gmt":"2026-05-20T22:12:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=12017"},"modified":"2026-05-20T23:12:33","modified_gmt":"2026-05-20T22:12:33","slug":"x-men-united-3-annotations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=12017","title":{"rendered":"X-Men United #3 annotations"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>X-MEN UNITED #3
\n“The Loneliest Ghost”
\nWriter: Eve L Ewing
\nArtist: Tiago Palma
\nColour artist: Brian Reber
\nLetterer: Joe Sabino
\nEditor: Tom Brevoort<\/strong><\/p>\n

COVER:\u00a0<\/strong>Emma Frost intervenes in an argument between Beast and Magneto. Charitably, something approaching this does happen in a subplot.<\/p>\n

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

Emma Frost.\u00a0<\/strong>She’s unhappy with Beast’s time-travel glitches. At the end of the issue, she has a missed call from Lourdes Chantel; we haven’t seen Lourdes since she was killed by Orchis in the 2023\u00a0Hellfire Gala\u00a0<\/em>one-shot, though she was presumably among the many mutants resurrected in\u00a0X-Men Forever\u00a0<\/em>#2 at the tail end of the Krakoan era.<\/p>\n

Magneto.\u00a0<\/strong>He grumbles that the mission was doomed from the start – although the actual problem that’s emerged is a technical time travel issue that has nothing to do with his argument in the previous issue that Captain America is only trying to assuage his own guilt. That said, his views from that scene are essentially echoed by Vernon Weaver in this story (see below).<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Kitty Pryde.\u00a0<\/strong>Also unhappy with Beast’s performance. At the end, she has nine missed calls from Nina, her love interest from Exceptional X-Men<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Beast.\u00a0<\/strong>Well, he’s trying to fix the largely-impenetrable time travel problem, and eventually does. The idea seems to be that the four away team members have been sent to the same place at different times. Nothing really seems to come of this, though, and they all seem to meet a Vernon Weaver of roughly the same age who seems to be experiencing the same conversation with all four of them. Since Weaver’s powers don’t seem to have anything to do with time travel, this is presumably meant to be some side effect of the time travel confusion. But it’s not honestly clear to me what the\u00a0point<\/em> of the quantum stuff is, other than to string out the story a bit before everyone sits down to have a chat.<\/p>\n

For added confusion, the opening caption describes the past sequences as taking place in “the past (or a reasonable simulacrum)”. Overall, the intention does seem to be that it’s the past.<\/p>\n

Wolverine (Laura Kinney).\u00a0<\/strong>She gives a speech about how Weaver needs to forgive himself for what he did as an involuntary test subject, drawing the natural analogies with the way she was exploited by the Facility. She mentions that her own mother forgave her for killing her – this is Laura’s interpretation of Sarah Kinney’s dying words from X-23<\/em> #6 (which is a reasonable interpretation, but the word “forgive” isn’t actually used).<\/p>\n

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

Captain America (Steve Rogers). <\/strong>Not much to add, to be honest – he helps to calm down Weaver, listens to his story, and is appropriately remorseful. He’s grateful to the X-Men for their help and would have liked to thank Axo personally; he’s a little hurt at the suggestion that Axo sees him as a military authority figure.<\/p>\n

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

Axo.\u00a0<\/strong>He does what he’s told to help fix the time travel problem. He declines the opportunity to meet with Steve Rogers – Kitty ascribes this to him being busy, but Emma claims that he “harbours an aversion to militarised authority”. I’m not sure how seriously we should take that, since it sounds more like Mel\u00e9e.<\/p>\n

Mel\u00e9e.\u00a0<\/strong>At first she makes a reasonable attempt to calm Weaver, using her powers purely defensively, but later she offers to simply phase him into the furniture. She seems to be serious, even though all of her teammates want to talk Weaver down or (in Laura’s case) subdue him in a more gentle fashion. Possibly the idea is that she doesn’t have the skill to beat him in any less drastic way, and it doesn’t really occur to her that her more experienced colleagues can handle him.<\/p>\n

STUDENTS:\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Jitter.\u00a0<\/strong>She uses her powers to calm Weaver down using “negotiation” and “hypnotherapy”. It’s fair enough in principle that Jitter can copy this sort of skill, but we’re very much into the territory of ignoring or circumventing her one-minute time limit here. Her ability is to copy other people’s skills for one minute, not to do more in a minute than they ever could. Reading the story as a whole, I think<\/em> Ewing is intending to write Jitter as hyper-competent when using her copied skills, but Weaver’s emotional swings wind up are so abrupt that he comes across as mentally unstable.<\/p>\n

ANTAGONISTS:\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Vernon Weaver.\u00a0<\/strong>Not really a villain at all, so we’ll go with “antagonist”. This is the character from the end of the previous issue who was implied to be Maurice Canfield, but it turns out that he isn’t. He’s new, and he’s a retcon into Canfield’s back story.<\/p>\n

Weaver is a mutant, which presumably accounts for him still being alive and relatively active at the age of well over 100. However, his actual power seems to be to produce stone-like prorusions on his forearms and forehead, which he uses as bludgeoning weapons. Quite reasonably, Weaver is very upset about what happened to the test subjects from Truth: Red White & Blue<\/em>. He initially seems inclined to fight anyone who he regards as a US government representative although he doesn’t appear to have any personal animus against Steve Rogers beyond that.<\/p>\n

According to Weaver’s account, he was born in Georgia, and lived with his father after his mother died. They farmed land where his grandfather had once been a slave. His father was killed in a lynching; the immediate trigger is left intentionally unclear, but the strong implication is that his father’s pride in his World War I military service had something to do with it. Vernon then fled to Philadelphia, where he was taken in by the wealthy Camfield family. He seems to have been effectively adopted by them (though presumably not officially, since he hasn’t changed his name). He claims to be responsible for getting Maurice into radical politics, by opening his eyes to the wider world.<\/p>\n

Weaver says that when Maurice was forcibly enlisted by the government (in\u00a0Truth: Red, White & Blue<\/em> #1, after being convicted for protesting against the war), he voluntarily enlisted in order to be with his brother. He was also among the Camp Cathcart test subjects, and had to kill one of the other subjects, Dalton, in self-defence. He escaped, thus avoiding getting killed in action along with most of the other “successful” test subjects, but he\u00a0didn’t make it back to Philadelphia until the Camfield family were all dead (which happens by the end of Truth<\/em> #4).<\/p>\n

Quite what happens after that is very vague. Since he’s been living in the Camfield family home all this time, presumably we should take it that he inherited the estate in the absence of any other relatives – although he doesn’t seem to have kept it in particularly good condition. In the epilogue, he’s helping to fund something called the Maurice Camfield Freedom School, but he suggests that the funding comes from Steve Rogers and that he himself is only “rich in life experience”. (The school is presumably associated with the Philadelphia Freedom Schools organisation.<\/a>)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

X-MEN UNITED #3 “The Loneliest Ghost” Writer: Eve L Ewing Artist: Tiago Palma Colour artist: Brian Reber Letterer: Joe Sabino Editor: Tom Brevoort COVER:\u00a0Emma Frost intervenes in an argument between Beast and Magneto. Charitably, something approaching this does happen in a subplot. THE X-MEN: Emma Frost.\u00a0She’s unhappy with Beast’s time-travel glitches. At the end 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,"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12017","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-annotations"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12017","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=12017"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12017\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12019,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12017\/revisions\/12019"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12017"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12017"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12017"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}