Wolverine: Old Man Logan (Comics) | Review

Picture this: Wolverine has aged beyond recognition, his claws dulled, living in a wasteland where super-villains rule with iron fists. Old Man Logan by writer Mark Millar (Huck: Big Bad World, Ultimate War) strips away everything we know about Logan and rebuilds him as a broken man carrying the weight of humanity's failure.

This isn't your typical good versus evil adventure. The story hits like a gut punch from the opening pages. We're thrown into an America where the Hulk's inbred family terrorizes California, Hawkeye traded his bow for survival and Spider-Man's costume hangs in a museum.

Millar creates a world so thoroughly defeated that even reading about it feels hopeless. Yet somehow, that's exactly what makes this story brilliant. The despair becomes the foundation for something unexpectedly powerful and emotionally resonant.

Set fifty years after the super-villains finally won, Old Man Logan follows an aged Wolverine who's sworn off violence after a mysterious traumatic event. He's living as a farmer with his family, paying rent to the Hulk Gang who've claimed California as their territory.

When rent comes due and Logan can't pay, he's forced to take a cross-country job with a blind Hawkeye, delivering a mysterious package across the villain-controlled wasteland that was once America, setting up their dangerous journey.

The America they traverse isn't just defeated but grotesquely transformed. Former superhero headquarters have become villain strongholds, innocent civilians live under brutal oppression and hope itself seems like a foreign concept from a forgotten era.

The journey becomes a tour through Marvel's graveyard. We see Doctor Doom ruling the East Coast from his Doomstadt, the Red Skull wearing Captain America's costume in former Washington D.C. and countless fallen heroes whose legacies have been perverted by their enemies. Each location reveals corrupted heroism.

Hawkeye's blindness serves as both literal handicap and metaphor for how heroes failed to see their downfall coming. His unusual partnership with Logan creates unexpected chemistry, mixing dark humor with genuine moments of brotherhood between them.

What makes this work isn't just the shock value of seeing heroes defeated but how Millar uses each revelation to chip away at Logan's resolve to stay peaceful. Every discovery becomes another crack in his constructed pacifist facade, forcing readers to question Logan's stance.

The central mystery revolves around what broke Wolverine so completely that he won't pop his claws even when his family's lives are threatened by Hulk Gang. Millar parcels out many hints throughout the story, building to a revelation that re-contextualizes everything we think we know about Logan's moral code and psychology.

The payoff doesn't disappoint, connecting to Wolverine's long history with the X-Men while explaining his current pacifist stance. The revelation feels both shocking and inevitable, grounding Logan's transformation in decades of established continuity and emotional weight.

The final act transforms from road trip adventure into personal reckoning. Logan must confront not just external enemies but internal demons, making choices that determine whether heroism can survive in a world that's forgotten its meaning.

This storyline stands largely independent from other Marvel continuity, though it draws heavily on decades of X-Men history and lore for emotional weight. The story later influenced the Logan movie and spawned several sequel series, establishing Old Man Logan as an alternate timeline that often intersects with main continuity.

Artwork by Steve McNiven (Death of Wolverine, Uncanny Inhumans: Time Crush) deserves its own paragraph because it's that good. His detailed, cinematic style transforms every page into a movie frame, from the intimate character moments to the sprawling wasteland vistas.

McNiven excels at showing the passage of time through visual storytelling, making Logan's age feel genuine rather than cosmetic. The way he draws action sequences makes them feel brutal and consequential, not flashy superhero theatrics.

Millar's writing strikes the perfect balance between world-building and character development. He could have easily made this just a gory exploration of defeated heroes but instead uses the dystopian setting to examine Logan's psychology. The dialogue feels natural, avoiding overly dramatic speeches that plague many crossovers.

Old Man Logan succeeds because it treats Wolverine as a man first and a superhero second. This isn't about claws and healing factors, it's about guilt, redemption and what happens when someone who's lived as a weapon tries to live as a person.

Millar and McNiven created something that transcends typical superhero storytelling by asking harder questions about heroism and its costs. The story works whether you're a longtime Marvel reader or someone who's only seen the movies.

It's accessible for newcomers while rewarding long-time fans with references and emotional payoffs decades in the making. More importantly, it tells a story that doesn't require reading seventeen tie-in issues to understand what happened. This is Wolverine at his most human self, which makes him more heroic than ever.

Wolverine: Old Man Logan arc is collected in Wolverine: Old Man Logan trade paperback, hardcover and oversized editions, available at comic shops, bookstores and major online retailers. For digital readers, it's accessible on ComiXology, Kindle and Marvel Unlimited.