Old Man Logan: Past Lives

This was the final issue of the Old Man Logan series to be written by Jeff Lemire and it has even more of a retrospective feel to it than usual. As things get started Logan has decided he wants to go back in time and to the specific part of the multiverse where the saga began so that he can save Baby Hulk, and maybe his family too. Unfortunately, none of his friends and enemies want to help (he appeals to the Marvel science-and-sorcery brain trusts, from Doctor Strange and Scarlet Witch to Black Panther and Doctor Doom), so as a last resort he springs a devil-worshipper named Asmodeus from supervillain prison. Asmodeus says he’ll send Logan back into his past, but –surprise! – he’s actually going to double-cross Logan. I don’t know why Logan would have expected anything less. That struck me as silly.

Anyway, instead of going straight back to the Wasteland, where it all got started, Logan ends up being unstuck in time, forced to “re-enact [his] greatest hits.” His fight with Hulk. The climax of the Phoenix story. As Patch in the streets of Madripoor. He even gets to re-use his famous tag-line about bad guys taking their best shot but now it’s his turn. But eventually he does get back home, only to have to say good-bye to his wife and kids, knowing that he can’t save them.

(An aside: I was a bit put off by Lemire not knowing the difference between a combine and a tractor. When Logan gets back to his farm he’s shown working on what is referred to as “the combine” but which is really just a tractor. A combine is a combination harvester. From the looks of it, I don’t think they’d have any use for a combine in the Wasteland, which is a Western desert landscape like that of the homestead in The Searchers. And I never could figure out what kind of farming the family was doing in that movie. On further reflection though, I thought this made for a fitting vision of our dystopic future, caring for and repairing old machinery that nobody has any use for now anyway.)

As a way of wrapping Lemire’s part of the series up this sort of thing is fine, but it doesn’t stand out as being a great or essential comic on its own. It has the feel of the last episode of some long-running TV show, like Seinfeld, where you just bring everybody back for a cameo before shutting things down. I like the art by Filipe Andrade (the first couple of issues here) and then Eric Nguyen, the latter feeling influenced by Sorrentino’s earlier modeling of the character while also doing its own thing. And the mechanism for the time-skips, a magic amulet, is at least easy to follow, even if there’s no discernible rhyme or reason to how it works. Of course this wasn’t to be the end of the line, as the series would continue. But there’s still a well-deserved sense of an ending.

Graphicalex