{"id":3476,"date":"2016-07-14T22:35:42","date_gmt":"2016-07-14T21:35:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=3476"},"modified":"2016-07-14T22:35:42","modified_gmt":"2016-07-14T21:35:42","slug":"old-man-logan-8","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=3476","title":{"rendered":"Old Man Logan #8"},"content":{"rendered":"

Following from the “Bordertown” three-parter,\u00a0Old Man Logan<\/em> gives us a one-shot story. \u00a0And it’s time, yet once more, to contemplate the imminent\u00a0collapse of society.<\/p>\n

Now, these are apocalyptic times indeed. \u00a0Pop culture – hell, culture generally – is not exactly going through one of its optimistic phases. \u00a0Not that it\u00a0particularly should be. \u00a0And so sure, there ought to be something\u00a0to work with in the hook of\u00a0Old Man Logan<\/em>, the thing that makes him different from the original Wolverine – which is not so much that he’s old, or even specifically that he was tricked into killing his version of the X-Men, but that he’s already lived through the collapse of the\u00a0society around him.<\/p>\n

What seems like a rather abstract pessimism to everyone else is a much more concrete possibility for him, even a likelihood, because he’s seen it happen before. \u00a0This, potentially at least, is what distinguishes him from Cable, who also came back in time with a vague agenda of making sure that his\u00a0awful future never came to pass. \u00a0Cable’s apocalypse was\u00a0way, way in the future and he was trying to nip it in the bud. \u00a0But\u00a0(this) Logan\u00a0is in\u00a0what he regards as the final days of a\u00a0world that’s about to die. \u00a0Even though he\u00a0seems to accept that this isn’t actually his past, he still assumes that\u00a0something equally horrible is presumably coming down the pipe in the near future, and he expects to lose again – emotionally, if not rationally – because that’s just the general course of history that he’s come to accept. \u00a0All things die, and these things die roughly here and now. \u00a0There ought to be something in that.<\/p>\n

But it’s one thing to have that idea, and another to develop it into an actual story. \u00a0This issue consists of flashbacks to the night the villains attacked in Logan’s timeline and wiped out all the heroes, intercut with teen Jean Grey taking Logan to visit the various locations where, of course, nothing is happening. \u00a0The idea, I guess, is to have the violent\u00a0OTT chaos of the flashbacks alternating with placid scenes in the present day, although that doesn’t come across as well as it might – there’s something a bit muted and distant about Andrea Sorrentino’s art even when he’s doing the big stuff, and while a few of the flashback panels have highly stylised lighting effects, most go for an autumnal palette not a million miles from the present day stuff.<\/p>\n

Beyond that\u00a0contrast, taking\u00a0Logan to these locations doesn’t really seem to serve any\u00a0definable point as such. \u00a0It’s just Logan being very sad about what\u00a0happened and\u00a0Jean offering moral support while reassuring him that it might never happen. \u00a0The pay-off is that she takes him to a bar in Madripoor to reunite him with some of his (well, Logan’s) friends – Jubilee, Steve Rogers,\u00a0Clint Barton and Puck – so that\u00a0they can have some drinks. \u00a0Everyone here pretty much treats him as the real Wolverine back from the dead, because the scene works better that way, and if you’re willing to run with that\u00a0then there’s some good stuff with Jubilee.<\/p>\n

Loosely, the idea seems to be that he’s been distancing himself from everyone because he expects everything to come crashing down soon enough anyway, and Jean is encouraging him to reach out to people and start to reintegrate into the world. \u00a0But there are a couple of problems with that.<\/p>\n

For one, the\u00a0closing page with Jean and Logan\u00a0is ungodly heavy handed – not only are they watching the sun come up, but\u00a0the story ends with Logan saying that “I\u00a0think you finally made me realise I don’t have to face it alone”. \u00a0It’s not, I suppose, that\u00a0heavy handedness is necessarily a deal breaker in superhero comics – much of this\u00a0story is flashbacks expanding on an idea by Mark Millar, after all,\u00a0and Millar is\u00a0very much\u00a0a this-goes-to-eleven kind of writer. \u00a0And Jeff Lemire is certainly trying to write the sort of lunatic chaos that Millar had in mind; there’s a neat idea of having Giant-Man swarmed by Moloids as if he was being consumed by ants. \u00a0But it all sits a bit weirdly with the hangdog, sorrowful, muted Logan of the art.<\/p>\n

More to the point, though,\u00a0we only just finished a three-parter of Logan trying to reach out to the modern-day counterpart of his future wife, bringing the Reavers down on her head, and reaching the\u00a0conclusion that trying to track down his old friends is only causing them trouble, so he ought to keep to himself. \u00a0Sure, you can argue that that doesn’t really apply to friends who are actually superheroes. \u00a0But it continues the pattern\u00a0of this series where the character keeps learning, unlearning and re-learning the same things over and over again. \u00a0He’s gone from\u00a0broken retiree to renewed hero (twice), to vicious vigilante, to broken retiree again, to renewed hero again, to trying to reach out\u00a0to his family, to learning to steer clear of his family, to deciding he needs to reach out to people again. \u00a0Individually,\u00a0these arcs largely make sense – as a whole, they suggest a book with no clear direction.<\/p>\n

Where is any of this going? \u00a0How do you pay this off? \u00a0I guess you could have him discover\u00a0our version of the villain uprising in the planning stages and unequivocally avert it – and kill him off in the process, because once you’ve done that story, he’s just a spare Wolverine. \u00a0But even if there is an end goal in mind, the book is taking a tremendously meandering route to get there.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

There’s a nice idea here for a character, and something that could make him properly distinct from the original Wolverine, but\u00a0expanding\u00a0it into an ongoing series is seeming like\u00a0a struggle.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Following from the “Bordertown” three-parter,\u00a0Old Man Logan gives us a one-shot story. \u00a0And it’s time, yet once more, to contemplate the imminent\u00a0collapse of society. Now, these are apocalyptic times indeed. \u00a0Pop culture – hell, culture generally – is not exactly going through one of its optimistic phases. \u00a0Not that it\u00a0particularly should be. \u00a0And so sure, […]<\/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-3476","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\/3476","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=3476"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3476\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3477,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3476\/revisions\/3477"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3476"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3476"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3476"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}