Now I've been having mixed feelings with Marvel Comics of late with their recent money-grabbing price rise on their most popular books and sporadic fill-in style quality on some others. However, the Wolverine: Old Man Logan storyline by the Hulk-level heavyweight team of Steve Mcniven, Mark Millar, Dexter Vines, and Morry Hollowell has gotten better and better with each successive issue.Mcniven's art just keeps getting more polished. He rose to people's attention with his standout work on Marvel Knights and hit it out of the park with the main Civil War book. Old Man Logan is probably his best work to date. The storyline loosely follows the plot of one of my favorite balls-out, hard-ass Clint Eastwood westerns, Unforgiven. Set in an alternate future after the villains have all but wiped out super-powered heroes Logan aka Wolverine has given up his seemingly inexhaustible potential for violence in return for eking out a subsistence farm living with his wife and two kids in a burnt out cinder of California desert. All the while he is harassed by Bruce Banner's inbred, Hulked-out relatives who demand the "rent" and threaten to tear down Logan's life before his eyes. What follows is a cross-country quest for cash romp which features (in no particular order) the Spidermobile, Hank Pym's skeleton (now an expressway), a Venom-infected Tyrannosaurus Rex, Black Bolt, Moloids, and much more!!!
This issue starts out with President Red Skull standing over and gouging the eyes out Blade Runner-style of a banged up and weeping Captain America (presumably Bucky by the uniform, flesh left arm, and brown eyes but who knows at this point). That Nazi fuck thinks he's got all the cards until he eventually decides to gloat over a shot-up Logan and poor old dead, blind Hawkeye's corpses in his "trophy room" (Reed Richards is skinned and stretched on one of the walls like a flag - dope!).
Of course Logan's inevitable healing factor kicks in and Red Skull tries to give our favorite Canadian scrapper a final beat down with Black Knight's magical sword. Unfortunately for him, he gets his fascist ass handed to him in truly fine fashion with no less than Captain America's indestructible shield to the trachea. USA! USA!
The issue ends with Logan flying all the way back across the country in Iron Man's old armor and showing up to pay the Hulk gang two weeks early only to be told "They got bored." I'll let you decide what's going to happen next from the picture below:
Win! Win! Win! A great story, with tons of cool little nods to the fan boys, connection to Wolverine's origin in Hulk #181, and all ending up in a previously unannounced Double-Sized special which will probably cost $8.00 by the time it's done. I don't care. I'm there. Go get-em you hairy old Canuck bastard!
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