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Oct 15

Old Man Logan

Posted on Thursday, October 15, 2015 by Paul in x-axis

It is the nature of big crossovers – even of the type Marvel do nowadays – that sometimes a tie-in book pops up, whose remit is to move a character from A to B.  This isn’t always a bad thing; often, a remit like that is so minimal that it makes it perfectly possible to wrap a decent story around it.  A plot point for the big story can double as a macguffin for the small one.

Old Man Logan is a series that exists to get a character from A to B.  But when you get down to it, that’s pretty much the sum total of what happens in the book.

This Logan is the older version of Wolverine from a dystopian future (ah, so many dystopian futures) who appeared in a Mark Millar storyline a few years back.  He retired as a superhero in a bout of angst-ridden remorse after being tricked into killing the rest of the X-Men, but Millar’s storyline ended with him coming back into the game.  He’s being folded into the regular Marvel Universe after Secret Wars, which makes a kind of sense as a way to keep a version of Wolverine in circulation without reversing the Death of Wolverine stuff just yet.

So, fine.  The Old Man Logan continuity – presumably the actual one, rather than just something vaguely similar as with most of the callback minis – has wound up as the Wastelands, a domain in Battleworld.  The job of this series, by all appearances, is to get Logan from the Wastelands to the Manhattan domain (the setting for Ultimate End), so that he can hook up with the heroes in the final battle against Dr Doom at the end of the series, en route to being transported to Earth.  There’s a basic structural problem with that to start with, which is that the climax of the series takes place in another series – something that the final issue actually lampshades by replacing its finale with some cryptic handwaving before a coda which dumps Logan on the reconstituted Earth.

But the problems go deeper than that.  It’s a series which is very much less than the sum of its parts.  And that’s a shame, as many of its parts are perfectly good.  The first issue starts with a perfectly promising set-up: Logan is starting to get back on the rails as a western-type hero in the Wastelands, but when an Ultron head shows up out of nowhere, he decides he has to investigate.  Since the only Ultron in the Wastelands turns out to be a dead end, it’s time to climb over the wall.

So far so good.  Visually, it’s a lovely series with some imaginative and effective layouts; Andrea Sorrentino pitches the older Wolverine about right to be clearly aged without being implausibly decrepit (considering what the plot demands of him), even if his emotional range rarely strays beyond hangdog sorrow.  And to start with, we have a good old fashioned quest to hang it on.  And as you’d expect with Bendis, there are some nice little conversations here and there, mostly on the theme of Wolverine encountering versions of characters who are long dead in his time.

But the quest goes nowhere, and what follows from it is essentially a bounce around some random bits of Battleworld, in seemingly arbitrary order.  It’s the Age of Apocalypse domain!  It’s Technopolis from Armor Wars!  It’s the Deadlands!  It’s Manhattan!

If there’s a point to any of this, it seems to be to have Wolverine start to come to terms with the chaos and exercise some sort of control over what’s going on.  But that control is pretty minimal, and besides, the heavy lifting of setting up Logan as a retired hero ready to return to the fray was already done in Millar’s story.  The final issue reunites him with a version of the X-Men and the Ultimate Universe’s version of his son, all of which is, I guess, setting up a “second chance” angle for him in the post-Secret Wars Marvel Universe.  But it never feels especially earned by anything that came before.  And whatever happened about that Ultron head, anyway?  The narration keeps reminding us of it, but nothing comes of it.

 

It certainly doesn’t help that nobody seems to have clued up Bendis on the basic rules of how Battleworld works – or at any rate, he’s not altogether on the same page as everyone else.  Characters in this series do know about Doom, the Thors, and the existence of physical barriers between their domains.  But, except for the Thors, everyone seems completely ignorant of what’s on the other side, and simply astonished by a parallel Wolverine showing up.  This might just about fly for the general public in some domains, though the existence of multiple versions of the same character is plainly general knowledge in many parts of Battleworld.  But Apocalypse, the baron of his own domain?

Moreover, the idea of Logan as a bizarre anomaly is presented in the final issue as correct – it tries to tell us that Logan is a bizarre anomaly who proves that something is wrong with Battleworld, merely by virtue of the fact that he’s travelled there from another world/domain.  But while that’s certainly something that Doom tries to contain, presumably to minimise the contradictions that he has to smooth over in people’s minds, we’ve also seen plenty of evidence that it happens fairly routinely – the inhabitants of Battleworld treat it as a crime, not as a physical impossibility.

And that pretty much kills the final issue, because it’s not even something you can readily shrug off as an unfortunate continuity error – the intended pay-off relies on the wider Secret Wars context to have any meaning, so when it gets that context badly wrong, the scene just doesn’t work.  Old Man Logan has some good bits, but the bigger picture doesn’t work at all – the Secret Wars context just doesn’t allow for a story that tells us that a wanderer between domains is an incredible oddity, when half the line is doing it.  And even if it did, there still wouldn’t be a plot beyond “Logan goes from A to B via C, D, and E.”

It’s frustrating, because Old Man Logan starts so well.  But it ends badly.

Bring on the comments

  1. Reboot says:

    I was expecting something more… acerbic?

  2. Nu-D. says:

    @Reboot,

    Paul is always more generous to Bendis than I would be. I haven’t read OML, but given the fundamental flaws Paul flags, I suspect it’s terrible dross as usual.

    Any story that treats Logan as some kind of metaphysical anomaly is stupid. It was stupid in House of M, and it’s stupid here. Logan’s just a man. That’s his whole schtick. Just a guy who happens to be a good brawler. If he’s some magical unique person throughout the multiverse, that defeats the purpose.

  3. Chris says:

    “he’s not altogether on the same page as everyone else.”

    That’s every Bendis since Disassembled.

  4. Paul says:

    I was feeling a bit more sympathetic after re-readi the earlier issues, which aren’t bad at all. (Also, I’d just read rhe What If one-shot, which is a whole level of pointlessness beyond this.) But yes, it falls apart.

  5. wwk5d says:

    “It’s frustrating, because Old Man Logan starts so well. But it ends badly.”

    You could also apply this to much of Bendis’ post-Disassembled work as well.

    “keep a version of Wolverine in circulation without reversing the Death of Wolverine stuff just yet.”

    It would have been nice to see if Marvel would have had the balls to keep a Logan-free Marvel Universe. As it is, we’re already getting Wolverine X. Comic book deaths are already drama-free since you know the character will come back eventually. Having an alternate universe version show up makes it eve more drama-free.

  6. Paul says:

    A completely predictable end point is only really a problem if the creators are under the misapprehension that it’s a surprise. If they write on the assumption that the interest is in how you get there, it’s fine.

  7. jpw says:

    “Bendis writes something that starts out strong and has good individual scenes, but is less than the sum of its parts, ignores continuity and other writers, and ultimately doesn’t go anywhere” pretty much describes all of his non-Ultimate Spidey work.

  8. Nu-D. says:

    @jpw,

    That’s not fair. None of his indy work is like that 😉

    Nor, really, were Daredevil and Alias. Of course, they were relatively continuity-free.

    It’s his team books that are a disaster.

  9. jpw says:

    Fair enough. I agree that DD and Alias were good, though DD kinda ambled along without much focus from #50 to the beginning of “The Murdock Papers.” I haven’t read his indie work.

  10. kelvingreen says:

    Does he still write everyone with the same voice? That was a fun part of his Avengers “work”.

  11. Tim O'Neil says:

    Remember when the big reveal at the end of WOLVERINES was, Destiny needed Mystique to resurrect Wolverine so Wolverine could somehow magically stop the Incursions? I think this one goes in the same bin . . .

  12. Andrew Brown says:

    What! Bendis started strong but flubbed the ending? i’m shocked! shocked i say!

  13. Dazzler says:

    For the record, Bendis’ Daredevil started strong and by the end I’d lost all faith in serialized storytelling.

  14. JG says:

    I can’t remember a single Bendis story where I think he nailed the ending. House of M was ok I guess.

    But I’ve only ready some, not all, of his Marvel work, and none of his independent stuff.

  15. Omar Karindu says:

    I can’t remember a single Bendis story where I think he nailed the ending. House of M was ok I guess.

    He’s done it well in his earlier work. The second arc in the original Ultimate Spider-Man series sticks the landing, and I’d say the “Hardcore” arc in his Daredevil works well, too. I’ll also give him high marks for the first New Avengers Annual, the one with the wedding of Luke Cage and Jessica Jones; it even has a fairly ingenious way for the heroes to defeat the villain of the issue.

    Otherwise, he likes anticlimaxes and shaggy dog stories way too much, and over the years he’s gotten less and less interested in basic plot mechanics. He feels very much like a writer who wants to write dialogue scenes and has some good initial plot concepts, but he gets bored (or maybe overworked?) rather quickly and just sort of lets his plots peter out.

  16. Omar Karindu says:

    Sorry about the italics tag mistake.

  17. Joseph says:

    Bendis not even trying to pretend there’s a story here.

    The only reason this works at all is andrea sorrentino’s amazing art. beautiful, but really interesting meta-layouts doing unique things with temporality. Really excellent artist, worth it for the art alone.

  18. Neil Kapit says:

    What baffles me is how Bendis can do interviews where he seems honestly and genuinely excited about the characters and his new ideas and stories for them, and then produce work with so little actual content, beyond long spreads of sentence fragments that sound like characters talking ABOUT things rather than actually doing them. I’d understand if he was doing it for purely mercenary purposes to put his kids through college. I’d actually respect that. I don’t have anything against him. But I can’t understand how the person writing these stories can be so excited about them when it rarely comes out on the pages, even with the best of artists. (Especially since Bendis is writing these comics full-script, before there’s any art at all, right? So all he’s got are the words, the many, many words with so few connections to each other)

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