Old Man Logan #1-4 – “Berserker”
I could have sworn the first trade paperback for this series was announced as covering the first six issues. But issue #6 turns out to end halfway through the second storyline, so evidently not. Never mind. Let’s do issue #1-4, which covered the first arc, even if they did end months ago.
Wolverine is dead. Fortunately, we have a spare. This is the version of Logan from the 2008-9 arc by Mark Millar and Steve McNiven, who resurfaced during Secret Wars and wound up stuck on the Marvel Universe after the climax. In fact, since this is a direct continuation of the Secret Wars miniseries, it’s really issues #5-8, but so it goes.
So is there a point to this? Well, beyond the obvious one, which is to keep publishing Wolverine stories even though he’s meant to be dead right now? It’s debatable. Using the character in this way, he has to be similar enough to the regular Wolverine to fill the gap, but different enough to avoid it being a really blatant cheat. Or at least to make it the sort of blatant cheat that people will shrug their shoulders and accept.
The point of the character isn’t so much that he’s old. Wolverine’s already old, and for all that this one has grey hair, he’s only slowed down to the extent of dialling back his fighting prowess to slightly saner levels. This story nods to his healing factor being slower than it used to be, but the bottom line is that we’re still looking at someone who can put up a fight against the Hulk.
The reason why Millar and McNiven made him old was because their story was set in a post-apocalyptic future and they wanted to stress the passage of time and the idea that he was a survivor of a bygone era. He was also a bit of a hangdog figure who had given up on being a hero after being tricked with illusions into killing the other X-Men. But we’re not in that future any more, and Millar already did the story where he recovers his will to fight for a better world. And then Brian Bendis did it again in Secret Wars. So at this point, once he’s removed from his setting, isn’t this version of the character basically just Wolverine?
These four issues – like both the Millar and Bendis arcs – are essentially an episodic travelogue. Jeff Lemire, who is also writing the character as a regular in Extraordinary X-Men, basically wants to get him from the end of Secret Wars to joining the team. This involves touring the modern Marvel Universe while Logan gets the culture shock out of his system.
As with the Secret Wars arc, Andrea Sorrentino does an excellent job of selling the character as grizzled and old, and making him visually distinct from the original Wolverine, even while keeping him in much the same outfits that he’d have traditionally worn. There are also quite a lot of visual fireworks here with elaborate and inventive page layouts, some of which are more effective than others – it’s hard to see how doing a dramatic double-page splash as a homage to Dark Knight Returns does anything other than distract from the plot, for example.
Logan fairly quickly figures out that he’s travelled back in time and that the world hasn’t collapsed yet. That leads to what seems to be the main theme that’s going to distinguish him from the original Logan: this one has already seen the Marvel Universe collapse around him and sees this as his second chance to stop that happening. Where he starts, however, is not by trying to change the general direction of the world, but instead by trying to hunt down individual baddies who specifically caused him trouble. So he starts out by hunting down one of the local thugs from his homestead, who in the present day is a Z-list petty villain, and kills him before his career can even get started.
This is a potentially interesting idea, but it doesn’t really get followed up because soon enough we’re on to the Hulk, who was the big baddie of Logan’s future. Right now, though, the Hulk is Amadeus Cho, which takes us in a somewhat less interesting direction, as Logan starts to figure out – thanks to a teenage Hulk, a female Hawkeye and an elderly Steve Rogers, who ultimately takes him to the memorial where the original Wolverine’s adamantium statute is now kept – that this isn’t his past at all. Lemire does a solid job of selling Logan’s suppressed berserker tendencies and of making his disorientation convincing. Reasonably enough, Logan initially writes off all the anomalies as one of those odd stories he must have forgotten (just because a key player is already dead doesn’t mean he won’t be alive again next Thursday), before finally accepting that he’s wasting his time here trying to change his own past.
At which point he goes to have a directionless wander in the wilderness until the X-Men show up in Extraordinary X-Men. Which is not a hugely satisfying resolution, to put it mildly.
With his flashbacks to Logan’s future/past, Jeff Lemire seems to be trying to set up the idea that Logan is missing the point by focussing on altering his personal history. That’s something where he’s driven by anger and by finally being presented with the possibility of changing something that he saw for years as out of his control. But the bigger issue (the flashbacks suggest) is that he allowed himself to stop fighting for a better world in the first place, which is a lesson that he can apply here in a more abstract sort of second chance. Which is fine, except for two things.
One, this arc doesn’t get to him picking up on that lesson, no doubt in order to leave it for Extraordinary, which leaves this arc to be a bit of a deck-clearing exercise.
And two, having Logan learn that lesson really just restores him to the original Wolverine, in which case, why not just use the original? To be fair, the next arc seems to be trying to answer that – by doing a story where he tries to track down the Marvel Universe counterpart of his wife – but that’s still a plot driver rather than anything more.
What we have here, bottom line, is a stand-in Wolverine, who isn’t that much different from the original. Perhaps that’s in the nature of the character, but it still feels like a somewhat futile exercise.
Wait, wait. Wolverine died and became encased in adamantium, so they just stuck the corpse up on display somewhere for people to gawk at? I mean even putting aside good taste, hasn’t anyone listened to that Black Sabbath song Iron Man?
It’s not exactly on display. It’s in a tomb.
I think what’s most impressive is that Marvel has managed to make Wolverine more over-exposed since his death.
The first story-arc didn’t do anything for me, but the second story-arc has won me over. The first chapter from Lemire actually made me feel something for the character, which is always a good sign.
Then, the return of some classic Wolverine villains with a new design caught my interest.
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Hey, the USSR stuffed Lenin and put him on display as a sign of respect. If it’s good enough for a dictator, it’s good enough for Logan!
I would totally read a series about Old Man Lenin wandering around modern day Russia and trying to change things.
Lemire’s take is ovvio yet more bianche than Bendis’s, ehi che was basically a tour of Battleworld. The second arc made it clear this is the same character from Extraorindary, but ultimately the plot suffers from being creepy and not really making any sense. But again, Andrea Sorrentino’s art work is what makes this book special. What he does with rhythm and color in storytelling is really something.
“I think what’s most impressive is that Marvel has managed to make Wolverine more over-exposed since his death.”
Nice trick there, huh? At the end of the day, a blatant cheat is a blatant cheat. All you can do is just hope you get some decent stories out of it.
I guess of you enjoy the character, enjoy him while he lasts, until the inevitable return of the original Wolverine.
All of this raises the question – So what exactly did Franklin Richards have against Logan?
Is he a wee bit mutophobic given that he was happy to make changes to the world so that random dead people survived but Mutants are still on the brink of extinction while Logan and Professor X remain dead.
I know.
Shhhsh.
Wait. Did you say Franklin Richards changed the world at the end of secret wars?
Didn’t he do that in past stories? Can’t they find someone else to do that stuff?
Sad.
Hey, why introduce a new all-powerful being who can restore the Marvel Universe to what it basically was when you’ve got one already lying around?
He apparently couldn’t manage to fix any of the problems that actually led to Secret Wars in the first place either.
Considering things like “Time still being broken” and etc.
Asking a child to do this job was probably a very bad idea, in the end.
I guess there are no child labor laws in the Marvel Universe either. 😉
I’m convinced they are going to keep the OML version of the character around for a while. That way Hugh Jackman can keep playing the character in a believable way while clearly aging.
I mean they can’t just keep making x-men movies set in the past while Wolverine keeps showing up older than he was in the first film haha.
@bnybim: It’s been announced the next film will be in the 90s. It occurs to me that if they stick with this pattern, the one after that will be concurrent with the original trilogy. Then the sixth one will be contemporary, and the seventh will be in the future…
Sorry, the fifth will be contemporary and the sixth will be in the future.
While Paul called Old Man Logan a stand-in Wolverine that isn’t much different from the original, I wonder if the whole point was to have a Logan that was just different enough…
In not so kind terms, Wolverine had long been a joke. Marvel had done everything with him. He healed from everything, he knew everybody, he was on every team, one month he’d be super grim-dark leading death squads followed the next month having light-hearted comedy adventures fighting sewer gators with a teen hero. Writers had fallen into repetitive traps, going again and again to a handful of story wells.
So Marvel killed off classic Wolverine and brought in alternate timeline/universe old Logan.
Now Marvel has a semi-new non-god Logan to play with. Writers can claim his healing factor is slower, and readers can pretend to believe it (even though he’s really popping back from damage at pretty much the same speed as classic god-Wolverine did.) It felt silly and repetitive when classic Wolverine went for his biannual find-a-wilderness-town/bar-to-find-myself funk, but it isn’t so strange to see old man Logan do it. There is now some measure of distance between this new Old Man Logan and the millions of people that classic Logan was connected to, as much of the world thinks Logan is dead, Logan probably still thinks of much of the world as dead, and accepting that this isn’t his timeline also means having in the back of your head that the people in it in a way aren’t the people he knew in his own past.
But readers don’t care about Old Man Logan or Girl Wolverine, so what does it matter? Hard to get invested in pinch hitters who we all know won’t last.
Laura’s not going anywhere, though, even if she won’t remain Wolverine forever. Logan II is presumably destined for a blaze of glory but in principle you can do something with that by giving him a definitive ending that people will actually buy into – which would never work with the original.
Doop, how many readers care about comics at all anymore?
I’m actually reading Old Man Logan, which is more than I can say for classic Wolverine for years before his death.
I don’t care about Old Man Logan however I like Laura Kinney thus I still have a preference for the real Wolverine. Don’t fool yourselves, the original one is a great character very brave strong charismatic and now he’s seemingly dead he lacks me a lot. I love this ragging beast with a heart of gold but the elder Logan doesn’t import for me. HIs stories are dark complicated hard and not great. So, please if you want me to be happy bring back the real wolverine, let female wolverine does her job but bring back the real LOgan of earth 616 to her side. I thought it was lame and a pitiful death that Wolverine had, he is dead shamefully not killed by his enemies but without his admantium. It’s horrible !!!