It is the nature of big crossovers – even of the type\u00a0Marvel do nowadays – that sometimes a tie-in book pops up,\u00a0whose remit is to move a character from A to B. \u00a0This isn’t\u00a0always a bad thing;\u00a0often, a remit like that is so minimal that it makes it perfectly possible to wrap a\u00a0decent story around it. \u00a0A plot point for the big story can double as a macguffin for the small one.<\/p>\n
Old Man Logan<\/em> is a\u00a0series that exists to get a character from A to B. \u00a0But\u00a0when you get down to it, that’s pretty much the sum total of what happens in the book.<\/p>\n This Logan is the\u00a0older version of Wolverine from a dystopian future (ah, so many\u00a0dystopian futures) who appeared in a Mark Millar storyline a\u00a0few years back. \u00a0He retired as a superhero in a bout of angst-ridden remorse\u00a0after being\u00a0tricked into killing the rest of\u00a0the X-Men,\u00a0but\u00a0Millar’s storyline ended with him\u00a0coming back into the game. \u00a0He’s being folded into the regular Marvel Universe after\u00a0Secret Wars<\/em>, which makes a kind of sense as a way to keep a\u00a0version of Wolverine in circulation without reversing the\u00a0Death of Wolverine<\/em> stuff just yet.<\/p>\n So, fine. \u00a0The Old Man Logan continuity – presumably the actual one, rather than\u00a0just something\u00a0vaguely similar as with most of the callback minis – has wound up as the Wastelands, a domain in Battleworld. \u00a0The job of this series, by all appearances, is to get\u00a0Logan from the Wastelands\u00a0to the Manhattan domain (the setting for Ultimate End<\/em>),\u00a0so that he can hook up with the heroes in the final battle against Dr Doom at the end of the series,\u00a0en route<\/em> to\u00a0being transported to Earth. \u00a0There’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\u00a0a coda which dumps Logan on the reconstituted Earth.<\/p>\n But the problems go deeper than that. \u00a0It’s\u00a0a series which is very much less than the sum of its parts. \u00a0And that’s\u00a0a shame, as\u00a0many of its parts are perfectly good. \u00a0The first issue starts with a perfectly promising set-up: Logan\u00a0is 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. \u00a0Since the only Ultron in the Wastelands turns out to be a dead end, it’s time to climb over the wall.<\/p>\n So far so good. \u00a0Visually, it’s a lovely series\u00a0with some imaginative\u00a0and effective layouts; Andrea Sorrentino pitches the older Wolverine about right to be\u00a0clearly aged\u00a0without being implausibly\u00a0decrepit (considering what the plot\u00a0demands of him), even if his emotional range rarely strays beyond hangdog sorrow. \u00a0And to start with, we\u00a0have a good\u00a0old fashioned quest to hang it on. \u00a0And as you’d expect with Bendis, there are some nice little conversations here and there,\u00a0mostly on the theme of Wolverine encountering\u00a0versions of characters who are long dead in his time.<\/p>\n But the quest goes nowhere, and what follows from it is essentially a bounce around\u00a0some random bits of Battleworld, in seemingly\u00a0arbitrary order. \u00a0It’s the Age of Apocalypse domain! \u00a0It’s Technopolis from\u00a0Armor Wars<\/em>! \u00a0It’s the Deadlands! \u00a0It’s Manhattan!<\/p>\n 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. \u00a0But that control is pretty minimal, and besides, the heavy lifting of setting up Logan as\u00a0a retired hero ready to return to the fray was already done in\u00a0Millar’s story. \u00a0The final issue reunites him with a version of the X-Men and\u00a0the 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<\/em> Marvel Universe. \u00a0But it\u00a0never feels especially earned by anything that came before. \u00a0And whatever\u00a0happened about that Ultron head, anyway? \u00a0The narration keeps reminding us of it, but\u00a0nothing comes of it.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n 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\u00a0everyone else. \u00a0Characters in this series do know about Doom, the Thors, and the existence of physical barriers between their domains. \u00a0But, except for the Thors, everyone seems completely ignorant of what’s on the other side, and simply astonished\u00a0by\u00a0a parallel Wolverine showing up. \u00a0This might just about fly for the\u00a0general public in some domains, though\u00a0the existence of multiple versions of the same character is plainly general knowledge in many parts of Battleworld. \u00a0But Apocalypse, the baron of his own domain?<\/p>\n Moreover, the idea of Logan as a bizarre anomaly is\u00a0presented in the final issue as\u00a0correct<\/em> –\u00a0it tries to tell us that Logan is a bizarre anomaly who proves\u00a0that something is wrong with Battleworld, merely by virtue of the fact that he’s travelled there\u00a0from another world\/domain. \u00a0But 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 –\u00a0the inhabitants of Battleworld treat it as a crime, not as a\u00a0physical impossibility.<\/p>\n 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\u00a0intended pay-off relies on the wider\u00a0Secret Wars<\/em> context to have any meaning, so when it\u00a0gets that context badly wrong, the scene just doesn’t work.\u00a0\u00a0Old Man Logan<\/em>\u00a0has some\u00a0good\u00a0bits, but\u00a0the bigger picture doesn’t work at all –\u00a0the\u00a0Secret Wars<\/em> context just doesn’t allow for a story that tells us that a wanderer between domains is an incredible oddity, when\u00a0half the line is doing it. \u00a0And even if it did, there still wouldn’t be a plot beyond “Logan goes from A to B via C, D, and E.”<\/p>\n It’s frustrating, because Old Man Logan<\/em>\u00a0starts so well. \u00a0But it ends\u00a0badly.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It is the nature of big crossovers – even of the type\u00a0Marvel do nowadays – that sometimes a tie-in book pops up,\u00a0whose remit is to move a character from A to B. \u00a0This isn’t\u00a0always a bad thing;\u00a0often, a remit like that is so minimal that it makes it perfectly possible to wrap a\u00a0decent story around […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3219","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-x-axis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3219","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3219"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3219\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3223,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3219\/revisions\/3223"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3219"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3219"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3219"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}