Old Man Logan

I’ve dumped on the Marvel multiverse concept quite a lot over the years, so I think it’s only right to give them credit when it works. And if you wanted perhaps the best example of that you need look no further than this storyline by writer Mark Millar and artist Steve McNiven.

The world-building here is exceptional. The world in question is (checks notes) Earth-807128, which is about as rotten a hellscape as you could imagine. There’s been a battle between superheroes and villains and the bad guys won. America has been divided up among various boss-level villains and Old Man Logan, no longer Wolverine because of a tragic incident in his past that we only find out about later, is living as a rancher with his wife and kids in a burnt-out version of Sacramento. It looks like the Wild West.

This part of the U.S. is run by the Hulk Gang: the original Hulk/Bruce Banner, who has gone insane, and his degenerate and bullying green descendants. They even beat Logan up. Anyway, in need of money, Logan agrees to accompany a blinded Clint Barton/Hawkeye on a cross-country trip to deliver some secret contraband to D.C.

This is where the hellscape and world-building I mentioned really kicks in. As the two former superheroes pass through parts of the U.S. run by Kingpin, Doctor Doom, and finally the Red Skull (now the president of the United States) they are witness to scenes of incredible violence and desolation. They see the Punisher and Daredevil fed to a pair of dinosaurs in an arena. They meet up with Barton’s daughter, but she’s gone full Spider-Bitch and tries to kill him after overthrowing Kingpin. They’re chased by a T-Rex that has bonded with the Venom symbiote. They meet up with a sort-of resistance underground headed by the White Queen. And finally they get to D.C. where Barton gets killed and Logan is captured by the Red Skull. He escapes after decapitating the Skull with Captain America’s shield and returns to Hulkland only to find that the Hulk Gang has killed his family. He takes a spectacularly bloody revenge before riding off into the sunset with Baby Hulk, on their way to more adventures.

This is all hard, hard, hardcore stuff, especially with all the heroes and villains being cruelly tortured and destroyed. Logan himself takes several severe beatings, but of course he’s immortal so no matter how badly he gets disassembled or destroyed he’s always going to come back. But with that warning for the faint of heart, I came away impressed with what Millar and McNiven managed to accomplish. This is a fast-paced, wild ride that keeps upping the ante with every turn in the road (a road that I was grateful to follow with the map provided of Logan’s and Barton’s route across the no longer United States).

The road trip framework isn’t open-ended but makes this a self-contained story, with a beginning, middle and end, or departure, journey, and return. I’ve read few series with such a satisfying sense of completion, even if Marvel (as always) decided to keep the Old Man Logan storyline going. The way it all works is mainly through a kind of narrative edging: we keep waiting for Logan to snap and “pop his claws,” and Millar keeps denying us, even finding ingenious workarounds for Logan’s fight with the Red Skull. But when he gets back to Sacramento and finds what’s happened we finally get it, an orgasmic double-page spread of SNIKT! and then, claws finally extended “The name isn’t Logan, Bub . . . It’s Wolverine.”

Old Man Logan isn’t a deconstruction of the superhero mythos any more than the spaghetti western blew up the traditional Hollywood oater (and that’s a connection that’s very much in play here). But, like the spaghetti western, it’s a more violent and dirtier rendering of that mythology. So not for everyone, but in its own way a contemporary classic.

Graphicalex