Wolverine – Old Man Logan by Mark Millar

I didn’t read Old Man Logan when I was a kid. Growing up, my cousin had this thing where no one was allowed to like anything he liked or he accused you of copying him, and sometimes he would punch you.  He loved Wolverine, so I said whatever. I didn’t read much Wolverine.  There was a lot of other good stuff out there.  Like Elektra: Assassin.

Post-Apocalyptic Marvel

Now that we’re older, I’m much bigger than he is.  There will be no punching.  So, I’ve started reading some Wolverine comics.  Like I said in my Just A Pilgrim post, I like post-apocalyptic stories, and Old Man Logan is kind of a post-apocalyptic Marvel universe.   On the “Night the Heroes Fell,”  evil won, the good guys disappeared, and the villains have been running things ever since.

Old Man Logan & Hawkeye

The bad guys have split up the U.S. into fiefdoms, extorting those living on their land.  The story starts with a pacifist Wolverine living on a ranch in the Sacramento desert with his wife and two kids.  He’s late on his rent to the Banners, the grandkids of Bruce Banner.  They are a nasty bunch. Hawkeye proposes a delivery job (read illegal smuggling) across the country that would raise enough money to pay the rent.  It has a Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid feel to it.  You can see where this is going.

Road Trips Are Fun

This is a fun road-trip comic with a pretty cool concept.  The old villains (or their descendants) and some of the heroes pop up in surprising ways.  There are several rabbit trails and plot twists on the journey.  Although the ending isn’t necessarily a surprise, the details leading up to it are certainly entertaining. Check it out here.

Update: After reviewing this, the movie Logan was released. It’s definitely worth watching, but it is not this graphic novel. The story here is different, and in my opinion better, simply because there are things in the graphic novel that can’t be done well on screen.

Amazon Music: Six Months of Disney+

Mutant Massacre

wilsonknut.comI guess I’m feeling nostalgic again for those innocent middle-school days.  I saw some X-Men: Mutant Massacre comics on sale on Ebay and was reminded how much I loved that series.  I had a subscription to X-Factor at the time, which was a spin-off featuring the five original X-Men.  My cousin got the X-Men comics.  Once the Mutant Massacre series started we had to borrow each others books to keep up, since it was a crossover series between the two teams.  Thor, Daredevil, and some lesser known comics were also involved in a minor way.

The series had a certain mystery noir to it, and it was released around the same time as Elektra: Assassin.  A lot of the action takes place in the underground tunnels of New York with a band of assassins killing the mutant community that lives in the tunnels.  The continuing storyline over eight issues or so, and the, what seemed at the time, more mature action and theme grabbed me.  Characters were getting killed and some favorites were gravely injured.  That’s serious stuff for an eighth-grader in the 1980s.  Remember, there was no internet and no violent video games.

Wikipedia-Mutant MassacreMarvel Gallery

wilsonknut.com