{"id":3617,"date":"2016-12-11T14:53:40","date_gmt":"2016-12-11T14:53:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=3617"},"modified":"2016-12-11T14:53:40","modified_gmt":"2016-12-11T14:53:40","slug":"old-man-logan-vol-3-the-last-ronin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=3617","title":{"rendered":"Old Man Logan vol 3: “The Last Ronin”"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve\u00a0complained\u00a0before that\u00a0Old Man Logan<\/em> didn’t seem to be heading anywhere – it was going round in circles with\u00a0Logan learning in one arc\u00a0that he needed to stop trying to change his past, and\u00a0in the next arc learning the exact opposite. \u00a0And with the series scheduled to\u00a0end\u00a0with issue #18, if it’s going to get to the point, it needs to get moving.<\/p>\n

So\u00a0it was\u00a0somewhat encouraging\u00a0that this\u00a0arc showed signs of a much-needed direction. \u00a0The\u00a0preceding arc\u00a0was a story about Logan visiting\u00a0Maureen – the girl who would grow up to be his future wife – intercut\u00a0with flashbacks about how they had met in his own timeline. \u00a0And “The Last Ronin” continues that parallel structure, with flashbacks to what Logan and Maureen did next, intercut with a story about Logan\u00a0meeting the same villains\u00a0in the present day.<\/p>\n

If I’d had this review out on time, then, I’d have been saying that\u00a0at long last we were seeing signs of\u00a0a real direction here. \u00a0Except that issue #14 is out now, and it seems to be\u00a0completely unrelated to any of this. \u00a0It’s the first part of a story guest starring STAKE, of all people – the\u00a0characters from the recently-cancelled\u00a0Howling Commandos<\/em> series – which seems like a complete waste of space in a book that’s nearly\u00a0finished. \u00a0Maybe they’ll get back to the point in the final arc proper.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

At any rate,\u00a0with this story we’re back in\u00a0Old Man Logan<\/em>‘s\u00a0favourite territory:\u00a0destiny, time travel paradoxes, and\u00a0the possible futility of trying to escape your fate.<\/p>\n

Explaining the plot is easiest if I ignore the parallel structure and take the future first. \u00a0After holing up in their bunker for another few weeks, Logan and Maureen went on the run when the villains eventually showed up. \u00a0(I guess there’s a vague implication that they were after Logan, but it’s not made clear.) \u00a0Without any communication to the wider world, they decide a reasonable plan is to steal a boat and sail to\u00a0Japan in the hope\u00a0that things are better there. \u00a0In fact, Japan turns out to be under the control of a bunch of warrior monks called the Silent Order who have enslaved everyone else,\u00a0with a guy called Sohei leading in the field, but with a meek psychic\u00a0ultimately in charge. \u00a0On reading Logan’s mind, the psychic is horrified to realise that\u00a0somebody so dangerous has shown up on his doorstep. \u00a0A big fight ensues and Logan kills everyone (including the psychic, which may arguably have been unnecessary), after which he and Maureen flee back to America,\u00a0and she reveals that she’s pregnant.<\/p>\n

Got all that? \u00a0Right. \u00a0So in the present day, Logan is\u00a0looking for Lady Deathstrike (who was the villain in the previous arc). \u00a0She turns out to be a prisoner of the Silent Order, who are using her as bait to lure in Logan. \u00a0A younger Sohei is\u00a0running the show, because the psychic at this point is a young boy\u00a0who’s rather confused to have been told that he’s\u00a0destined to\u00a0run this group. \u00a0However,\u00a0when\u00a0his powers manifested, he had a vision of the Order first\u00a0becoming the rulers of Japan, and then being destroyed by Logan (i.e., the stuff in\u00a0the flashbacks), and so the Order is trying to pre-emptively get rid of Logan to stop that happening. \u00a0After several issues of squabbling, Logan lets the boy read his mind, and the confused boy starts to turn on his pre-destined role, which naturally leads Sohei to decide that perhaps he had the wrong boy all along. \u00a0The boy then defeats the Silent Order himself before tagging along back\u00a0to the X-Men’s school.<\/p>\n

That last bit, by the way, is not at all easy to follow visually – for the life of me, I can’t work out what\u00a0the boy actually\u00a0does<\/em> to\u00a0the Silent Order to defeat them. \u00a0Unfortunately, as is often the case with Andrea Sorrentino, while the art is frequently\u00a0memorable and visually striking, and the hangdog take on Logan comes across well,\u00a0every so often there are some serious issues in terms of actually communicating the plot. \u00a0Does he drop a mountain on them? \u00a0Turn them into butterflies? \u00a0Something? \u00a0I genuinely haven’t a clue, and since this is the climax, the fact that it’s unintelligible\u00a0is a serious problem. \u00a0The dialogue seems to insist that they’re alive, but how that matches with anything in the art is beyond me. \u00a0On the plus side, the actual design of the Silent Order and their iconography is\u00a0strong, and the pit sequences are very effectively\u00a0conveyed.<\/p>\n

There are a number of plot problems here. \u00a0Since we’ve previously established that this version of Logan\u00a0doesn’t<\/em> come from our future, why is the boy psychic predicting events that happened in that world (and why doesn’t Logan comment on that)? \u00a0And why\u00a0didn’t he have the same vision in the Wastelands timeline, where\u00a0the plot is premised on the fact that the Silent Order don’t\u00a0recognise Logan as a threat until it’s too late? \u00a0The\u00a0story seems to be going for\u00a0the circular logic of a time-travel loop, but\u00a0if so, it doesn’t make sense even on those terms. \u00a0Then there’s the fact that by the end of the story you have Logan accusing the Order of exploiting the boy’s power, and\u00a0Sohei confidently insisting that Logan won’t\u00a0follow through on his threat to kill the boy. \u00a0Neither character has any particularly good reason to\u00a0think this: the Order do nothing to suggest\u00a0an ulterior motive beyond their religious convictions, and\u00a0Sohei’s attitude to Logan appears to be driven solely by the boy’s vision in which Logan\u00a0kills everyone.<\/p>\n

More fundamentally, nowhere in any of this\u00a0do we get\u00a0any\u00a0real indication of what the Silent Order actually is, what it believes in, what its agenda is, or, well,\u00a0pretty much anything else about it. \u00a0The sum total of our information about the\u00a0Silent Order\u00a0seems to be that it’s a bunch of warrior monks; that they have a prophecy that a boy psychic will lead them, which appears to be on track to come true; and that they were participants in the villain uprising in Logan’s timeline. \u00a0Beyond that, they have the trappings of being somehow religious, but\u00a0their agenda is completely unclear. \u00a0Are they actually just power-grabbers pretending to be religious? \u00a0Is their future Japan some sort of Taliban-like society where they’re trying to impose their (wholly unspecified)\u00a0worldview on the surviving public? \u00a0Who knows?<\/p>\n

Mind you, I could\u00a0see that\u00a0being a deliberate creative choice. \u00a0The Order’s specific\u00a0beliefs are not important to the plot – beyond the fact that they\u00a0have some, that they’re apparently sincerely held, and that they entail predestination. \u00a0So it’s quite possible that Jeff Lemire’s idea was that the Order’s ostensible beliefs have become entirely overshadowed by their obsession with Logan; any actual point has become lost in a literal self-fulfilling prophecy.<\/p>\n

If that’s the idea, then it could certainly have been drawn out more clearly. \u00a0But it wouldn’t be a bad idea, and it would\u00a0at least tie in with the themes of this version of Logan as a character. \u00a0If there’s a point\u00a0being\u00a0explored here, perhaps it’s\u00a0about how to respond to a seemingly hopeless situation, with\u00a0the future Logan and Maureen deciding to plough on with finding somewhere to carve out a space for themselves in an otherwise dead world,\u00a0as against the Silent Order setting themselves on a self-destructive path of trying to change the world. \u00a0Except that this doesn’t quite\u00a0work either, because the boy\u00a0did<\/em> successfully change history to avoid his fate (even if not in the specific way he had in mind), while Logan’s decision to withdraw from the challenges of\u00a0his world and resign himself to making the best of it is, in the logic of the book to date, an act of surrender. \u00a0Perhaps a future arc will try and draw these conflicting ideas together in a way which makes sense – the way the flashbacks are paralleled with the main story presents Maureen’s pregnancy as a crushing blow, as if it was something that doomed Logan and Maureen to go through the motions of hope –\u00a0but even if it does,\u00a0it still feels like a mess for now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve\u00a0complained\u00a0before that\u00a0Old Man Logan didn’t seem to be heading anywhere – it was going round in circles with\u00a0Logan learning in one arc\u00a0that he needed to stop trying to change his past, and\u00a0in the next arc learning the exact opposite. \u00a0And with the series scheduled to\u00a0end\u00a0with issue #18, if it’s going to get to the point, […]<\/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,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3617","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\/3617","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=3617"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3617\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3619,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3617\/revisions\/3619"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3617"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3617"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3617"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}