We may be comfortably into the Krakoa-era X-Men, but here’s one last book wrapping up from the previous era. Dead Man Logan may be billed as a twelve issue miniseries, but in practice it’s the final two arcs of Ed Brisson’s run on Old Man Logan, with art from the excellent Mike Henderson.

Old Man Logan is a problem character for the X-books. As a diversion for a few issues, which is how Mark Millar introduced him, he worked well enough – there was plenty about the Wastelands that was absurdly over the top, it being a Mark Millar comic and all, but the basic engine of the ageing western hero worked well for Logan. As a character brought back to the present day… well, it depends what angle you look at it from.

Viewed from his own perspective, there was something there, in a broken down, older version of Wolverine getting one more go at reliving a life that went horrendously wrong, and haunted by the fear that this one would all collapse around him as well. From the standpoint of the wider X-books, though, he served mainly to undermine the death of Wolverine Prime, by nearly instantly replacing him with a character who wasn’t all that different. The key of Mark Millar’s story was that he was a Wolverine driven into retirement who finally snapped and became Wolverine again. But since that story had already been done, the character was just… an older version of Wolverine.

And since Wolverine is already meant to be over a century old, “older Wolverine” isn’t really a hook. So unless you were going to do stories that turned quite specifically on his past in the Wastelands, he wound up just being a spare Wolverine. Old Man Logan itself often managed to avoid that; Old Man Logan as a character in X-Men stories generally didn’t.

The run-up to House of X saw a swathe of deck-clearing, clearing away the duplicate Silver Age X-Men, but also Old Man Logan. Even though his story has kept running in parallel with the Krakoa arc, he finally departed the Marvel Universe for his home timeline in issue #6, so he was comfortably out of the way so far as House of X was concerned. And these two arcs form the climax to Ed Brisson’s run which, clearly, was designed from the off to bring Old Man Logan to a definitive end. After all, if you play your cards right, there’s one great advantage that Old Man Logan has over the original: you can kill him, and people will believe it.

So Brisson’s run is all about bringing Logan to an end, something that’s been partly achieved by lifting a basic plot device of the Logan film: Logan has vials of a super healing serum which can temporarily get him back up to classic Wolverine powers, but he’s got a finite supply, he can’t get them replaced, and without them he’s terminally ill. You know the sort of finale this is heading to – especially if you’ve seen the film, but it’s hardly a massive leap anyway. And hey, it’s familiar, but at least it’s a good idea being reused.

Plus, Dead Man Logan has nothing to do with the actual plot of the movie, beyond the basic idea of giving the character a definitive end. What do you do to get rid a second Logan? You can have him get killed or vanish in the mainstream Marvel Universe, but everyone will expect him to come back. So instead, Brisson plays it straight and takes the guy back to the Wastelands.

The key to this is to make it feel like Logan has achieved something by getting home, instead of just giving up and going back to an apocalyptic wasteland. But the hook is easy: Logan tried giving his life a second go in the present, but for everything that was awful about the Wastelands, at least he had a wife and children there. That’s his home, and all he wants is to go home and be buried with his family. That’s the story.

So after he spent the first half of the series tying up loose ends in the present and getting back to the Wastelands, these six issues are spent on a road trip back across America to his home, helped by Dani Cage and the junior Hulk that he rescued as a baby, and pursued by various types who’ve picked up on his return and want to get him first.

Now, you can probably see where I’m going to have a problem with this: it’s six issues in the Wastelands, and I don’t especially like the Wastelands. This story gamely replicates the absurdity of what Millar set up, with cannibals trying to capture Wolverine and live off him (doesn’t he need fed…?), a patchwork Sabretooth (based on a line of dialogue from Weapon X), and a randomly jittery Speedball. All of this is pretty true to the spirit of the Wastelands as previously established. Which is to say, I get why it’s being done, but it’s not something that particularly grabs me.

But the book does hold on to the idea that Logan himself should have a certain quiet dignity in the middle of all this, and it does things with Dani to give a bit of hope for the Wastelands going forward. And it’s got Mike Henderson’s art, which is often starkly beautiful when the story allows for it, and suitably ridiculous when the story calls for a parade of grotesques. It doesn’t exactly make sense that Wolverine seems to go white as he nears death, but it sure looks good, and the second half of issue #12 is wonderful stuff.

Dead Man Logan has to rank as a success; it takes a duplicate Logan who was surplus to requirements, ties up his loose ends, and gives his story a definitive end that feels like it meant something. Wastelands stories can lend themselves to snide nastiness, but this is different; it’s Logan getting the ending he earned. It’s sentimental to be sure, but he’s Wolverine. He can take being sentimental.