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Dec 11

Old Man Logan vol 3: “The Last Ronin”

Posted on Sunday, December 11, 2016 by Paul in x-axis

I’ve complained before that Old Man Logan didn’t seem to be heading anywhere – it was going round in circles with Logan learning in one arc that he needed to stop trying to change his past, and in the next arc learning the exact opposite.  And with the series scheduled to end with issue #18, if it’s going to get to the point, it needs to get moving.

So it was somewhat encouraging that this arc showed signs of a much-needed direction.  The preceding arc was a story about Logan visiting Maureen – the girl who would grow up to be his future wife – intercut with flashbacks about how they had met in his own timeline.  And “The Last Ronin” continues that parallel structure, with flashbacks to what Logan and Maureen did next, intercut with a story about Logan meeting the same villains in the present day.

If I’d had this review out on time, then, I’d have been saying that at long last we were seeing signs of a real direction here.  Except that issue #14 is out now, and it seems to be completely unrelated to any of this.  It’s the first part of a story guest starring STAKE, of all people – the characters from the recently-cancelled Howling Commandos series – which seems like a complete waste of space in a book that’s nearly finished.  Maybe they’ll get back to the point in the final arc proper.

 

At any rate, with this story we’re back in Old Man Logan‘s favourite territory: destiny, time travel paradoxes, and the possible futility of trying to escape your fate.

Explaining the plot is easiest if I ignore the parallel structure and take the future first.  After holing up in their bunker for another few weeks, Logan and Maureen went on the run when the villains eventually showed up.  (I guess there’s a vague implication that they were after Logan, but it’s not made clear.)  Without any communication to the wider world, they decide a reasonable plan is to steal a boat and sail to Japan in the hope that things are better there.  In fact, Japan turns out to be under the control of a bunch of warrior monks called the Silent Order who have enslaved everyone else, with a guy called Sohei leading in the field, but with a meek psychic ultimately in charge.  On reading Logan’s mind, the psychic is horrified to realise that somebody so dangerous has shown up on his doorstep.  A big fight ensues and Logan kills everyone (including the psychic, which may arguably have been unnecessary), after which he and Maureen flee back to America, and she reveals that she’s pregnant.

Got all that?  Right.  So in the present day, Logan is looking for Lady Deathstrike (who was the villain in the previous arc).  She turns out to be a prisoner of the Silent Order, who are using her as bait to lure in Logan.  A younger Sohei is running the show, because the psychic at this point is a young boy who’s rather confused to have been told that he’s destined to run this group.  However, when his powers manifested, he had a vision of the Order first becoming the rulers of Japan, and then being destroyed by Logan (i.e., the stuff in the flashbacks), and so the Order is trying to pre-emptively get rid of Logan to stop that happening.  After several issues of squabbling, Logan lets the boy read his mind, and the confused boy starts to turn on his pre-destined role, which naturally leads Sohei to decide that perhaps he had the wrong boy all along.  The boy then defeats the Silent Order himself before tagging along back to the X-Men’s school.

That last bit, by the way, is not at all easy to follow visually – for the life of me, I can’t work out what the boy actually does to the Silent Order to defeat them.  Unfortunately, as is often the case with Andrea Sorrentino, while the art is frequently memorable and visually striking, and the hangdog take on Logan comes across well, every so often there are some serious issues in terms of actually communicating the plot.  Does he drop a mountain on them?  Turn them into butterflies?  Something?  I genuinely haven’t a clue, and since this is the climax, the fact that it’s unintelligible is a serious problem.  The dialogue seems to insist that they’re alive, but how that matches with anything in the art is beyond me.  On the plus side, the actual design of the Silent Order and their iconography is strong, and the pit sequences are very effectively conveyed.

There are a number of plot problems here.  Since we’ve previously established that this version of Logan doesn’t come from our future, why is the boy psychic predicting events that happened in that world (and why doesn’t Logan comment on that)?  And why didn’t he have the same vision in the Wastelands timeline, where the plot is premised on the fact that the Silent Order don’t recognise Logan as a threat until it’s too late?  The story seems to be going for the circular logic of a time-travel loop, but if so, it doesn’t make sense even on those terms.  Then there’s the fact that by the end of the story you have Logan accusing the Order of exploiting the boy’s power, and Sohei confidently insisting that Logan won’t follow through on his threat to kill the boy.  Neither character has any particularly good reason to think this: the Order do nothing to suggest an ulterior motive beyond their religious convictions, and Sohei’s attitude to Logan appears to be driven solely by the boy’s vision in which Logan kills everyone.

More fundamentally, nowhere in any of this do we get any real indication of what the Silent Order actually is, what it believes in, what its agenda is, or, well, pretty much anything else about it.  The sum total of our information about the Silent Order seems to be that it’s a bunch of warrior monks; that they have a prophecy that a boy psychic will lead them, which appears to be on track to come true; and that they were participants in the villain uprising in Logan’s timeline.  Beyond that, they have the trappings of being somehow religious, but their agenda is completely unclear.  Are they actually just power-grabbers pretending to be religious?  Is their future Japan some sort of Taliban-like society where they’re trying to impose their (wholly unspecified) worldview on the surviving public?  Who knows?

Mind you, I could see that being a deliberate creative choice.  The Order’s specific beliefs are not important to the plot – beyond the fact that they have some, that they’re apparently sincerely held, and that they entail predestination.  So it’s quite possible that Jeff Lemire’s idea was that the Order’s ostensible beliefs have become entirely overshadowed by their obsession with Logan; any actual point has become lost in a literal self-fulfilling prophecy.

If that’s the idea, then it could certainly have been drawn out more clearly.  But it wouldn’t be a bad idea, and it would at least tie in with the themes of this version of Logan as a character.  If there’s a point being explored here, perhaps it’s about how to respond to a seemingly hopeless situation, with the future Logan and Maureen deciding to plough on with finding somewhere to carve out a space for themselves in an otherwise dead world, as against the Silent Order setting themselves on a self-destructive path of trying to change the world.  Except that this doesn’t quite work either, because the boy did successfully change history to avoid his fate (even if not in the specific way he had in mind), while Logan’s decision to withdraw from the challenges of his world and resign himself to making the best of it is, in the logic of the book to date, an act of surrender.  Perhaps a future arc will try and draw these conflicting ideas together in a way which makes sense – the way the flashbacks are paralleled with the main story presents Maureen’s pregnancy as a crushing blow, as if it was something that doomed Logan and Maureen to go through the motions of hope – but even if it does, it still feels like a mess for now.

Bring on the comments

  1. Chris says:

    If he killed all the bad guys in Future Japan why did he leave?

  2. Paul says:

    Logan kills all the people in the Silent Order’s HQ, not the (presumably) much larger number who were out there controlling the country. The story isn’t desperately clear about this, but the art does show more Silent Order guys still patrolling the streets.

    Admittedly, this doesn’t really explain why they decide to go back to America rather than continuing on to somewhere else. It’s hard to imagine that the villains bothered occupying every tiny island in the Pacific.

  3. Brian says:

    I may be missing something, reading this on Marvel Unlimited (thus only up to the end of the Alaska arc), but reading this review reminds me particularly of the lost opportunity I keep seeing with OLD MAN LOGAN. Since he keeps imagining that he sees foreshadowing to his own crapsack world, it would be better to have him accidentally be seeding such a future – especially when faced with nascent psychic foes like the one described here. Rather than being an ersatz Wolverine with a coloring change, you’d get to add a TWELVE MONKEYS/LOOPER effect to the usual WEAPON X programming/free will question. But instead Lemire keeps repeating the same one theme over and over (without even playing off that in some timey-wimey fashion).

  4. Kris says:

    As a sidenote, in Marvel naming news, “sōhei” (僧兵) means “warrior monk.”

    Probably not common knowledge, which is a plus, but rather ridiculously on the nose, which is a minus.

  5. Billy says:

    The Last Ronin was to me the worst arc of Old Man Logan.

    The book as a whole kept returning to the idea of an inevitable future, but it just doesn’t have the foundation for that future to be inevitable. The first arc seemed to accept as much, with Logan trying desperately to prevent an “inevitable” future while everyone around him keeps showing him that he’s already in a completely different timeline, one that won’t lead to his bad future.

    The arc with present-day Maureen instead switched to a “bad things happen around Logan” idea.

    The Last Ronin returns to the inevitable future idea, except the roles are reversed. Others are desperately trying to avoid an “inevitable” bad future, while Logan tries to convince them that that future has already been avoided. But it just doesn’t work. For the first arc it was acceptable for Logan to think that he’d been thrown into the past and given a chance to prevent his future (at least if you take that arc on its own and ignore his appearances in other books). For Last Ronin, it just doesn’t work for the Silent Order to think that Logan would kill them in the future. It didn’t work for the kid psychic to see that future in the first place. Nor does it work for the Silent Order to believe that future is inevitable, when it doesn’t even seem particularly reasonable.

    Mind, it doesn’t help that I don’t care about the Maureen flashbacks. They don’t add anything to Logan’s character, and feel like pointless retconned filler even when they are meant to tie into the current day story. It also didn’t help that I didn’t particularly like the art in this arc, though I’d defended the book’s art in the previous arc. And it didn’t help that the story was overlong and boring.

  6. Niall says:

    I’ve picked up an issue here and there but at this point – time travelish stuff aside – isn’t Old Man Logan pretty much the same character as regular Logan?

  7. Billy says:

    Old Man Logan is older.

    Theoretically, he heals a lot slower, but writers pretty much ignore that.

    The early stories treated people as thinking he was the “real” Logan. Later stories treat him as an alternate reality Logan, with people accepting that “their” Logan is dead and this is a different Logan. But even that is a bit of a mishmash, partially due to writers trying to be smart (which led to messes like this story arc.)

    Mostly he seems to just exist in the MU as a backup Wolverine, getting thrown into the stories that X-23 doesn’t fit into. Pretty much like some of classic Wolverine’s guest appearances, except with people pointing out that he isn’t the “real” Logan.

  8. SanityOrMadness says:

    > I’ve complained before that Old Man Logan didn’t seem to be heading anywhere – it was going round in circles with Logan learning in one arc that he needed to stop trying to change his past, and in the next arc learning the exact opposite. And with the series scheduled to end with issue #18, if it’s going to get to the point, it needs to get moving.

    Do we know this? After all (and much to my surprise), All-New Wolverine is continuing into ResurreXion without so much as a new #1.

  9. Bob says:

    Not explicitly, but the solicit for #18 say “THE EPIC CONCLUSION”.

    It doesn’t specify conclusion to the arc or conclusion to the series. There’s also not a “final issue” variant that I know of.

  10. Bob says:

    Old Man Logan #19 & 20 solicited for March.

  11. Billy says:

    It’s not getting cancelled? Guess I might as well jump ship now instead of riding it out.

    The book’s writing and art both have been getting progressively worse. I’d figured the vampire arc itself was half phoned-in filler for a title that had already been given its death notice.

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