NEW: Guide to Old Man Logan Reading Order

Whoa, two weeks in a row? It’s true, Crushers – I’m back with a new X-Men guide for all Patrons of CK! This character’s core collections have been tracked on another longstanding Crushing Comics guide, but I felt like shoe-horning him into another guide did him a disservice. There wasn’t room for all of his guest-appearances, or to discuss the distinct periods of his continuity – from his modern classic introduction to his satisfying end. Plus, per usual, I couldn’t find any other guide who explained things the right way – not even Wikipedia! Thus, I bring you my brand new Guide to Old Man Logan!

Guide to Old Man Logan

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It was fine to leave Old Man Logan as a brief footnote in my Guide to Wolverine – Logan when we just had his original Mark Millar story – which was the case for the first five years of my Wolverine Guide!

However, once Brian Bendis delivered Old Man Logan into the present day via Secret Wars (2015), I’ve never loved the idea of his modern adventures being shoved into the main Logan guide. With 13 collected arcs to his name plus equally as many team appearances, it’s been clear to me for several years that Old Man Logan needed a guide of his own – which was emphasized when Marvel spun off several other books featuring the “Wastelanders” of his potential alternate future!

Marvel has a long, proud history of pulling fan favorite characters from alternate realities and potential futures into the present day. But, with half a decade of hindsight, I have to begrudgingly admit none of them have been quite so successful or succinct as Old Man Logan.

At first, the idea to import Old Man Logan to 616-Marvel seems like utter stupidity. Mark Millar & Steve McNiven created one of Marvel’s indisputable classics of the 21st Century with their original future tale of a withered old Logan, all alone in the post-apocalyptic Wastelands. The 2008-2009 arc is enduringly popular because it borrows DC’s formula for evergreen success – taking a beloved character and telling a contained bottle-continuity tale that anyone with any knowledge of the character can pick up at any time.

As successful as DC has been with their own stories of that nature, they also understand that merging them into mainline continuity is a war of diminishing returns. Yes, we’ve seen limited re-engagements with stories like Watchmen and Kingdom Come. Keyword: limited.

Thus, when Marvel teased that Old Man Logan would be one of the elements of the Secret Wars Battleworld that would become a permanent fixture in the 616 universe, I assumed the worst. It’s a very Marvel move, echoed by their present day canonization of characters like Deathlok, X-Man, Spider-Ham, Shard, Spider-Gwen, and many more.

Except… Old Man Logan turned out to be different. Really different.

A lot of that comes down to leaving him largely under the control of just two writers. Jeff Lemire’s remit was to have fun introducing him to the current world of Marvel for his first two years, and Ed Brisson’s remit was to have that world wear him down over his final three years.

The result is a tidy story – a rare definitive, complete character arc with a hard-to-retcon ending (although nothing is impossible in comics). Even if you add in all of Old Man Logan’s team appearances (and I re-read them all for the guide), his arc still make perfect sense. It’s only a handful of random cameos in line-wide events that feel incongruous, but that’s true for any Marvel character.

This is a rare guide where I have read literally every single issue in it before. Despite that, I reviewed all of those several hundred issues for this Guide to Old Man Logan… yes, I really do look at everything, even when I already know a character well.

In this case, I’m very glad that I did. I couldn’t fully appreciate the forest of Lemire & Brisson’s plot at the time because I was lost amongst the trees of those hundreds of issues. Read as a single binge, it’s a hell of a lot stronger… even Logan’s appearances in X-Men: Gold (2017).

(Trust me, no one is more surprised to be complimenting Gold than I am! The series still sucks as a whole, but it’s obvious that behind the scenes Marc Guggenheim was coordinating things with Ed Brisson.)

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