{"id":3792,"date":"2017-06-05T22:09:08","date_gmt":"2017-06-05T21:09:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=3792"},"modified":"2017-06-05T22:09:08","modified_gmt":"2017-06-05T21:09:08","slug":"old-man-logan-21-24-past-lives","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=3792","title":{"rendered":"Old Man Logan #21-24 – “Past Lives”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Coming a little late to the relaunch party, this is Jeff Lemire’s final arc on Old Man Logan <\/em>before handing over to Ed Brisson.\u00a0 It’s a bid for closure.<\/p>\n

Like\u00a0All-New X-Men<\/em>,\u00a0Old Man Logan<\/em> feels like a short-run concept, a second (or third) Wolverine while the real one is out of commission selling his death. \u00a0Played that way, the natural ending would be pretty obvious:\u00a0having found peace in the present, Logan heroically returns home to protect his loved ones anyway. \u00a0Or some such thing. \u00a0But\u00a0Old Man Logan<\/em> is selling pretty well by\u00a0Marvel’s current standards, and it isn’t going away any time soon.<\/p>\n

That points towards the\u00a0other ending, where Logan makes his peace with\u00a0staying in the present. \u00a0It would be\u00a0a fairly obvious ending too, except\u00a0\u00a0that\u00a0you’d usually want to\u00a0clear the way for the original Logan\u00a0to come back. \u00a0If that’s not a consideration,\u00a0then you’re left\u00a0to draw a line under old Logan’s\u00a0past.<\/p>\n

That’s basically\u00a0what we have here. \u00a0Lemire even helpfully spells it out\u00a0in a closing monologue;\u00a0throughout his run, Logan has been wavering back and forth between accepting his\u00a0second chance and\u00a0dwelling on his past, and now he’s able to move on. \u00a0The device to get us there is a time-travel jaunt through Logan’s personal history, which was set up in the previous two-parter.<\/p>\n

The idea here is that Logan wanted to get back home in order to take care of that\u00a0Hulk baby he rescued at the end of the Millar story, in case he grew up to become something terrible. \u00a0So he roped in a minor magical supervillain, Asmodeus, to send him there. \u00a0Asmodeus predictably double-crosses Logan,\u00a0leading to an episodic set-up where Logan\u00a0re-lives events from his own past with the addition of\u00a0a magical amulet, which he has to grab in order to jump on to the next stage. \u00a0It’s\u00a0apparently intended as a jaunt through this history of the character – the War of 1812, the Weapon X project,\u00a0his debut appearance against the Hulk, the Dark Phoenix Saga, Japan, Madripoor, and a 90s X-Men baseball game before we get to the Wastelands. \u00a0Meanwhile, in the present, Asmodeus is trying to auction off Logan’s body,\u00a0which is far and away the most impressive thing he’s ever had access to.<\/p>\n

That’s just plot mechanics, though, and there are\u00a0oddities here which never go anywhere. \u00a0As I mentioned before, Asmodeus is meant to be dead,\u00a0though I suppose you can always hand-wave that away where villains are concerned. \u00a0More fundamentally,\u00a0Logan isn’t meant to be old enough to have fought in the War of 1812 – the miniseries\u00a0Origin<\/em> has him as a child in the late 19th century. \u00a0Conceivably,\u00a0this might be deliberate, and intended to\u00a0establish that\u00a0this Logan is not in fact a potential future version of ours – but if so, nothing comes of it. \u00a0It feels like just a massive blunder, and at the very least it doesn’t fit the broader theme of repeating the development of his\u00a0published history.<\/p>\n

(Or at least the iconic bits. \u00a0The timeline jumps straight from 1991 to\u00a0Old Man Logan<\/em>. \u00a0I suppose they could have done\u00a0the bit where he lost his adamantium to Magneto in\u00a0X-Men<\/em> #25…)<\/p>\n

When it finally gets to the Wastelands, it’s pretty good. \u00a0Getting there is a bit of a slog. \u00a0Nothing in particular actually\u00a0happens<\/em> in the earlier segments. \u00a0Instead, their function is to establish the ground rules and the formula so that Lemire can subvert it when he gets to\u00a0the Wastelands. \u00a0But that still means three issues of jump, jump, jump.<\/p>\n

Artist Eric Nguyen is an interesting choice for this; there’s something a bit stylised and brittle about his work, but it can\u00a0accommodate all the various flashback sequences without having to actually\u00a0mimic their style, and it seems at home in the final issue. \u00a0Given that it’s the wrap-up,\u00a0ideally you’d have Andrea Sorrentino here\u00a0to maintain the book’s tone. \u00a0But while Nguyen doesn’t go for the same\u00a0formal fireworks, there’s something of the same melancholy here, at least when there needs to be.<\/p>\n

So, Logan does eventually make it back to the Wastelands, but at a point in time before his family died. \u00a0At\u00a0which, he simply abandons the idea of going to rescue Banner’s kid and decides he’s just going to stay and be with his family again. \u00a0Ultimately, of course, he does go home,\u00a0after realising that he literally can’t act to change history. \u00a0That means\u00a0that if he stays,\u00a0all he can do is hang around to watch his family get killed again. \u00a0In that sense, it’s not much of a\u00a0choice. \u00a0But that’s\u00a0not really the point. \u00a0The point of this is to have Logan come to terms with the idea of returning to the present, and to give him an opportunity to say goodbye to his family properly. \u00a0It’s hokey, but it sells that idea rather well.<\/p>\n

Old Man Logan<\/em> has been a meandering book, and not an altogether satisfying one; it often scores on atmosphere but seemed to lack direction. \u00a0“Past Lives” goes some way towards trying to\u00a0turn its circularity into a strength\u00a0by playing up the idea that Logan wasn’t able to move on; if he’s going to stick around for the foreseeable future, or even potentially replace the original\u00a0Wolverine for good, then\u00a0it’s probably time to downplay the Wastelands and focus on what he’s doing here and now. \u00a0But then\u00a0the question is why you’re not just using the original, or what makes him different. \u00a0That’s what the incoming creative team have to figure out.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Coming a little late to the relaunch party, this is Jeff Lemire’s final arc on Old Man Logan before handing over to Ed Brisson.\u00a0 It’s a bid for closure. Like\u00a0All-New X-Men,\u00a0Old Man Logan feels like a short-run concept, a second (or third) Wolverine while the real one is out of commission selling his death. \u00a0Played […]<\/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-3792","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\/3792","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=3792"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3792\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3793,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3792\/revisions\/3793"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3792"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3792"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3792"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}