Old Man Logan 1: Berserker

I guess one thing to say first off is that while this series is said to have been an inspiration for the 2017 movie Logan, the two don’t have anything in common except for an aging Wolverine. So if you hated that movie, you still might like the comics. Or not.

Anyway, I’ve said before how the multiverse became what defines superhero comics in the twenty-first century, and Old Man Logan provides yet another instance. In this alternative universe (it’s bar-coded as  Earth-807128) there has been a “supervillain uprising” that has seen the good guys all but wiped out and the Red Skull become president of the United States. Logan/Wolverine is now a homesteader in a version of the Wild West where the Hulk Gang (the degenerate offspring of Bruce Banner and She-Hulk) are running roughshod over everyone. Then somehow Logan gets sent back in time to our present day, a timeline where he memorably died and where he now takes it as his mission to prevent the grim future state of the supervillains from occurring. But if we believe in the whole idea of a multiverse with an infinity of variant worlds and timelines, this strikes me as Quixotic. Which, to be fair, is a point that’s raised here.

I like the basic idea of the superhero as retiree. Older readers in particular will be able to relate. There’s also a sort of Watchmen vibe going on, with Wolverine representing the Marvel O.G. against new incarnations of familiar names. I was nodding in agreement with Logan’s complaint about the 50 shades of Hulk and how that character “changes more than the moon. Grey, green, dumb, smart.” I also thought Andrea Sorrentino’s art really handled the action well, with lots of original signature panels and a style that evoked a world burnt-out with violence. Logan’s face is lined with what may be as many wrinkles as scars, looking like a map scratched out on parchment.

What I didn’t like was the whole idea of being thrown into another weird timeline I didn’t feel connected to in any way. Still, Jeff Lemire’s story here was good and the characters interesting if motivated in a rather dull way (the film that Logan took its cue from was Shane, while this comic draws from The Searchers). Also included in this volume is a standalone story set in the alternate-universe West where Wolverine takes out the Hulk Gang and the Hulkster himself in a gory series of showdowns (which was the climax of the original Old Man Logan arc). But of course if he could have done that in the first place, why the need to go back into the past to hunt Banner down there? Or maybe he did. None of these temporal paradoxes make sense.

Having said all that, the strength of the multiverse, and precisely what made it so popular at this time, is its ability to spin tired franchises off in strange new directions, which it does again here. The result is something different, and a pretty good comic in its own right.

Graphicalex