Easily one of the most important Wolverine stories of the last 20 years – and, perhaps, in all the character’s 50-plus career – Old Man Logan is also one of his most striking. It seems unlikely that a comic book fan in this day and age doesn’t at least know the story, even if they’ve never read it; movie fans get the atmospheric jist of it from the 2017 Fox film Logan, even if they don’t quite get the brutality present in the original.
Marvel
I was a little leery of going back to look at it after all these years; the story came out nearly 20 years ago, after all, and time colors our perception of quality. However influential books of the era are, they can now read a bit rocky; we’ve entered a new era of comics storytelling in those intervening decades.
Old Man Logan circumvents a good deal of that by being a relatively quiet book: Logan doesn’t talk much, and Mark Millar avoids unnecessary caption boxes. Exposition is light on the ground – the hallmark of the best Marvel dystopias – and though there is a bit of over-reliance on shock factor and gore, that’s expected of a truly genuine Wolverine story. You’re not getting out of it without some blood and stabbing.
The setup isn’t far from Marvel’s 1989 crossover, Acts of Vengeance, in which all the supervillains come together to target one each other’s heroes. In the world of Old Man Logan, this ploy actually worked, and the bleak barren wasteland that follows smacks of Mad Max. The most unsteady the book gets is in its distinctive misrepresentation of some of its villains, both present and absent; as with Acts of Vengeance, one can’t really believe that Magneto would join the ranks of villains, particularly villains under the leadership of noted Nazi, the Red Skull.
There are distinct Millar-isms: a tendency toward the distressing for the very sake of being distressing, as with the reference of an insane Hulk’s incestuous sexual assault of his cousin and the subsequent inbred redneck hulk children running amok. This is a book that loves its oblique references, and it isn’t afraid to fridge an entire family, however hackneyed that might seem now.
Marvel
What makes the book sterling, however, is the masterful work of artist Steve McNiven, whose work never fails to stun. Characters are fully realized, an comic booky realism etched into them from their facial expressions to the stitching on their clothes.
Is Old Man Logan dated? Yes, definitely so. But the visionary nature of the story and the book’s artwork make the hiccups of age blend with the modern; subject matter might have changed in 20 years, but impactful storytelling remains the most important aspect of good comics.
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