There’s a bit of a pattern emerging here.<\/p>\n
Between issues #4-5, Logan shows up in the first\u00a0Extraordinary X-Men<\/em> arc and joins the X-Men. \u00a0This series skips over all that and picks up with him taking one of his signature leaves of absence from the X-Men so that he can go off and spend some Logan time. \u00a0This time, he goes up to small town Alaska, retracing his steps from his post-apocalyptic future.<\/p>\n There, he spends\u00a0the better part of an issue settling into a nice\u00a0normal job and getting a place to live for the winter. \u00a0The point, as it turns out, is for him to track down\u00a0Maureen, the girl who would have gone on (in his timeline) to become his wife. \u00a0Logan’s narration tells us that he wants to stop\u00a0something-or-other\u00a0traumatic from happening to her.<\/p>\n Needless to say, this doesn’t work out at all well, because what actually happens is that a bunch of bad guys show up in town looking for Logan, and start ploughing through the town trying to get to him. \u00a0So, of course, simply by virtue of showing up to try and protect someone, Logan has ended up making matters immeasurably worse. \u00a0He\u00a0does<\/em> actually succeed in protecting her in the end, but not before leaving her good and traumatised anyway.<\/p>\n It’s never entirely clear what\u00a0Logan was trying to prevent in the first place. \u00a0It’s possible that this is meant to be a time\u00a0paradox story where he winds up being the traumatic event he was trying to avert, but that wouldn’t fit with the idea that this isn’t his\u00a0past (and we pretty clearly established in the previous arc that it isn’t). \u00a0That leaves the possibilities that either it’s a dangling plot for future reference, or it’s just intentionally non-specific.<\/p>\n The latter would work quite well here, because the broad point of this story – as emphasised by some symbolic pages in the final chapter – is that Logan can’t escape from his story, that he always brings chaos in his wake,\u00a0and that the only way he can really protect anyone from it is by succumbing to his own role and fighting back.\u00a0The mock-printed-page colouring effects on those pages seem intended to stress the idea that this is about the Wolverine story format, and everyone being worse off if Logan tries to resist playing his part.<\/p>\n The villains\u00a0could really be anybody, but as it happens, it’s Lady Deathstrike and a new version of the Reavers. \u00a0That’s as good a choice as any; they’re about the right level of threat, and their body horror angle suits the tone. \u00a0Deathstrike herself is\u00a0somewhat underused,\u00a0really being used more as an end of level boss than anything\u00a0more complex, but then it’s not her story; she’s just there to lend a bit of credibility to\u00a0the Reavers.<\/p>\n Andrea Sorrentino does some strong work throughout this. \u00a0In the past he’s\u00a0sometimes tended\u00a0to go for distractingly flashy symbolic page layouts, but this\u00a0arc tends to\u00a0leave that stuff to\u00a0the dream sequences and tells the story a bit more straightforwardly. \u00a0The body language of a\u00a0still slightly defeated-looking Logan does a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of selling this character as meaningfully different from the original Wolverine. \u00a0And the Reavers play to\u00a0his strengths,\u00a0letting him draw weirdly surreal and disturbing distortions of the human figure.<\/p>\n But the\u00a0upshot of all this\u00a0turns out to be Logan deciding that he’s going to go and\u00a0be proactive and hunt down the baddies. \u00a0Which…<\/p>\n Here’s the thing. \u00a0Mark Millar’s original\u00a0“Old Man Logan” story takes the character from a downtrodden retiree to a\u00a0reinvigorated hero. \u00a0Brian Bendis’ miniseries does pretty much the same thing again. \u00a0Jeff Lemire’s first arc in this book takes him from\u00a0viciously determined to alter his past to directionless. \u00a0And now here we are going from\u00a0conventionally heroics to “hunt them down and get them first”, which, functionally speaking, is pretty much what he spent the\u00a0previous arc learning\u00a0not<\/em> to do.<\/p>\n This doesn’t feel like a character\u00a0arc so much as a pendulum. \u00a0The basic idea that\u00a0even though Logan isn’t in\u00a0his own past, he\u00a0still\u00a0wants to\u00a0use his knowledge to stop something similar happening, makes reasonable sense. \u00a0But we have here a character who seems to\u00a0spent\u00a0the vast majority of his time appearing in arcs that result in him rededicating\u00a0himself to\u00a0a heroic cause. \u00a0And this\u00a0seems like\u00a0one\u00a0iteration too many – especially since it seemed to be setting up to say something a bit more interesting about the character in general, only to wind up\u00a0feeling like it’s retreading old ground.<\/p>\n I’m not desperately excited about “he’s Wolverine but proactive” as a direction, either. \u00a0That’s basically\u00a0X-Force<\/em> and it’s been done before with the original Wolverine. \u00a0It feels like we’re missing a hook\u00a0that really justifies this version of Logan as an ongoing protagonist distinct from the original.<\/p>\n But it’s a very nice book to look at, and\u00a0it does hit some strong emotional beats with Logan trying to dig Maureen out of the hole he’s got her into. \u00a0That’s a\u00a0good central idea –\u00a0it just doesn’t quite click when it moves beyond that to a bigger picture.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" There’s a bit of a pattern emerging here. Between issues #4-5, Logan shows up in the first\u00a0Extraordinary X-Men arc and joins the X-Men. \u00a0This series skips over all that and picks up with him taking one of his signature leaves of absence from the X-Men so that he can go off and spend some Logan […]<\/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-3461","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\/3461","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=3461"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3461\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3462,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3461\/revisions\/3462"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3461"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3461"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3461"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}