Old Man Logan 4: Old Monsters

The previous Old Man Logan volume was set in Japan because Logan went there to find Lady Deathstrike. In this one, or at least the first part of it, he’s off to Romania to hunt for Jubilee, who has fallen under the spell of Dracula.

I liked how things kicked off. The art by Filipe Andrade has a suitably gothic flavour to it, with blood flying like mad calligraphy or musical scores turned on their head, and the vampire-hunting Howling Commandos were a lot of fun. I also enjoyed the way they disposed of Dracula at the end. But as I said in my notes on The Last Ronin, if this series is just Logan or “Old Wolverine” (as he hates being called) putting in frequent flyer miles as he jaunts about saving people then it’s not really working for me.

But then in the second part of this volume (back being drawn by Andrea Sorrentino) Logan goes even further afield, finding himself (somehow) in space, visiting an orbiting station that has been taken over by the Brood. “What madness is this?” the back cover asks. I’m not sure. Because Jean Grey is on the space station too and she’s messing with Logan’s mind. In addition, it seems like Logan is caught in some kind of spatial-temporal flux, “stuck between two places”: the station and the wastelands, where he’s confronting Hulk’s grandson, who has grown up (way up) into a green Lord Humungus.

This was all kind of weird, and the sight of Wolverine roaring away in a space suit was, perhaps unintentionally, hilarious. Nevertheless I thought both parts of the story went down well, even if the Dracula adventure was very much a standalone. And the thing is, after The Last Ronin I was pretty much ready to give up on the series but after this I wanted to read a bit more, mainly to see if Jeff Lemire was going to be able to pull all this together.

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The Vault

A mix of standard SF-horror tropes. Underwater treasure hunters find a sarcophagus containing the remains of a demon that has been sealed away for centuries, or maybe millennia. They open it up and remove the occult seal from the demon’s corpse, thus reviving it. Carnage follows as the awakened beast goes on a bloody rampage, all while a hurricane strikes.

It’s basically Carpenter’s The Thing (the alien thawing out of the block of ice) meets Alien (the demon is a close cousin to the Xenomorphs). If you want something new, it’s that the action takes place in Nova Scotia (the author, Sam Sarkar, was born in Halifax), with the divers exploring the famed Oak Island “Money Pit.” I appreciated that part, but it doesn’t really add much. I’ve never visited Oak Island, or seen the TV show they made about its treasure-seekers, but I still felt I’d been here before.

It might have worked. I really liked Plunge, another recent horror comic that riffed on 1980s deep-water monster movies. But the plot moves awkwardly, with some abrupt breaks that left me momentarily confused, and the art doesn’t sell the action or suspense. In particular, the different characters are posed like plastic action figures, unmoving over several different panels, and their faces are totally expressionless, even when they’re supposed to be freaking out, delivering lines punctuated with triple exclamation marks!!!

Normally I’d only recommend this to hardcore fans of the genre, but I think they may be the most disappointed by it. It didn’t do anything for me.

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Saga of the Swamp Thing Book One

I’d read Alan Moore’s Saga of the Swamp Thing titles years ago, but had remembered them, falsely, as being a standalone series or a reboot of the franchise. That’s not the case. In fact, Moore took over with issue #20, which is a direct continuation of the events that concluded Swampy’s battle with Arcane, and the latter’s death. Or “death.” That was the end of DC’s Swamp Thing: The Bronze Age Volume 3 if you buy the collected editions.

After tying up the “loose ends” (the title of issue #20) to that storyline, Moore was off on his way, not really reinventing the character but subtly redefining him. It’s a new sort of origin story, being one that leaves the original in place. This is explained through the experiments of the Floronic Man on a frozen Swamp Thing in issue #21, which is a great comic and one that works well as a standalone.

Moore’s great theme in all his work is that of a powerful mind becoming unhinged, and he gets to indulge that a lot with the various characters  introduced here (Swamp Thing, the Floronic Man, Matt Cable . . . Jason Blood is already nutty). His writing is also in good form, with “plump, warm summer rain that covers the sidewalk with leopard spots,” and how “clouds like plugs of blooded cotton wool dab ineffectually at the slashed wrists of the sky.” I don’t want to go all in on comic writers being great poets because it’s a different game, but there are levels and Moore was usually operating at a higher one than most who have played it.

The crowded panels of Stephen Bissette and John Totleben’s artwork goes well with melting characters, wavy hair and mossy tendrils. There are also several glorious full-page drawings that are quite effective, especially since page layout is such a big part of the visual delight of the series. Nearly every page here is shattered in an interesting way.

I’m not a fan of all of Moore’s stuff, or even all of his Swamp Thing work, but as things kick off here you can tell why this has been recognized as a comic-book classic. Moore took an already established character and while keeping him very much the same in most important ways also made him his own.

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