Old Man Logan is obviously on its way to some sort of wrap-up.  With the original Wolverine on his way back, the Wastelands version is simply redundant.  The question is how to draw a satisfying line under this version of the character, given that his whole schtick is that his story came to an end only for him to return to the game.

Kill him?  Can’t really do that while bringing back the real Logan at the same time.  Have him wander off into the sunset?  Tough to buy.  Send him back to the Wastelands?  It’s the obvious thing to do, but it doesn’t seem very satisfying.  Ed Brisson’s answer seems to be to play up Logan’s mortality, so that his return to the Wastelands (to die) can seem like a dignified farewell.

The book’s already been setting up this idea by stressing the fact that Logan’s healing factor isn’t what it once was, so that he now needs his Regenix shots to boost it in times of need.  To move us along this time, we have two issues of Kraven the Hunter.

This is a bit awkward, if you’re reading Squirrel Girl, since that book has been doing a long-term redemption arc for Kraven, and this story totally ignores it.  In continuity terms, that isn’t a problem, because the Squirrel Girl arc ended just after storyline came out, by whacking the reset button and returning Kraven to his life of crime.  But from the standpoint of somebody actually reading the stories as they come out, it’s downright annoying.

Still, there’s a logic to using the classic Kraven persona here.  Despite his ridiculous costume, Kraven is actually a fairly natural Wolverine villain.  Not only is he a hunter/tracker kind of guy, but he’s all about proving himself to be the best.  Wolverine’s old tagline is that he’s the best, and Old Man Logan’s hook is that he is literally past his best.  Kraven claims here that he always wanted to go after Wolverine but the time never seemed right; it seems rather more likely, though, that he didn’t much fancy his chances against Wolverine, and thinks this version of Logan is more in his league.  Which he is.

According to Kraven, at any rate, his motivation here is to put Logan out of his misery before he does any more damage to his legacy.  In Kraven’s view, Logan is a travesty of Wolverine.  But Kraven being Kraven, and still stuck in the Silver Age, his idea of a dignified way of doing this is to dump Logan in the Savage Land and go for a nice hunt.  This is all totally absurd, of course, since Kraven is getting into Arcade territory here, setting up a ridiculously contrived scenario and claiming that the result proves something or other.  But that’s meant to be the point; none of this actually has any of the meaning that Kraven claims to be investing it with.

So it’s a run around the Savage Land for a couple of issues, and it all looks nice enough – Francesco Manna and Carlos Lopez provide some clear and effective storytelling, and the colouring on the dream sequence in part two has some beautiful lighting effects that make the Wastelands look like a summery paradise.

The end result is to have Logan beat Kraven, naturally, but have a little hallucination along the way where his family invite him to come back to the Wastelands to join them.  And this is the real point of the story: Logan knows Kraven was right that he’s on his last legs, and it’s time to call it a day and go home to the Wastelands for some final closure.  It’s not been that long since Jeff Lemire was doing a return to the Wastelands story, which makes this a little dubious, but I think Brisson gets away with it here, largely because the motivation is very different this time around.  It’s not about reunion so much as resolution, and the story is reasonably convincing about a genuine resolution being on the horizon.