Old Man Logan 2: Bordertown

Let’s start off talking about place. I don’t like visiting the Marvel multiverse because I’m never sure what timeline or alternate Earth we’re in or on, but at least I was getting adjusted to the set-up in this series after the Berserker volume. In that book Wolvie was sent back from a dystopic (post-supervillain takeover) Wild West to what I guess is our current reality. But things kick off here at X-Haven: “Refuge for mutantkind and headquarters of the X-Men. Located in the Limbo Dimension.” Damn it, we’re in another dimension now? I had to look X-Haven up online and found out that it was created in 2015. Who can keep up with all this except the most determined fanboys and –girls?

Anyway, after a bit of talking between Wolverine and Storm at X-Haven, Logan is back (via teleportation) to the present day and driving his motorbike north. “Really north. Through Canada and beyond . . .” Wait, north of Canada? What does he mean? Russia? Because to get there he’d have to drive over the North Pole and technically be heading south. But then we’re told he arrives at Killhorn Falls in the Northwest Territory: “Nothing but a few rows of trailers and shacks along the Alaskan border. Whole community is built around a gravel quarry sitting on a small port in the Gulf of Alaska.”

Now wait just a minute. The Northwest Territories (it’s a plural) does not share a border with Alaska. That would be Yukon Territory. And the shoreline of the Gulf of Alaska is all part of Alaska (the panhandle), and notably not northern Alaska but the south-east part.

And this was all written by Jeff Lemire, who is Canadian. I don’t get it. Are we in another weird dimension or is Lemire just lost when it comes to geography?

Putting this to one side, I liked this instalment of the Old Man Logan series, but in terms of the larger story I felt like there wasn’t much there. Basically Logan heads off to this remote mining town when Lady Deathstrike and the Reavers show up, so he destroys them while defending a little girl who in one timeline he is going to eventually marry. At least I think I have that right, but don’t hold me to it.

The fighting is good and Sorrentino’s art is aces again in evoking the dark world of aging butchery that Wolverine inhabits. That double-page spread of skeleton Wolverine laughing with skulls dropping from his mouth is quite something. Then in issue #8 we get a vision of the depressing Gotterdammerung that was the supervillain uprising and it’s pretty bleak. But as Logan knows, getting old is itself pretty bleak. That’s just the kind of series this is. I was going to say that’s the kind of world this is, but since it’s many worlds I can’t.

The bonus comic is Uncanny X-Men #205 from 1981, a Chris Claremont story that has Wolverine fighting Lady Deathstrike and the Reavers again. Or not really again, but before. Or maybe not before because time is as loose a construct as geography in the multiverse. It’s a good comic though.

So lots of Wolverine’s claws coming out with a Snikt! sound and lots of limbs being detached. Plus Wolverine learning to accept his identity as agent of chaos, madness, and death, which is a familiar character arc for him. You do get the sense that he’s growing tired of all this though, and that now the game is playing him.

Graphicalex