Old Man Logan #37
Old Man Logan #37, by Ed Brisson, Dalibor Talajic, and Carlos Lopez, is part two of “Moving Target.” Can Logan, his healing factor weakened, get the flash drive with dirt on Mayor Wilson Fisk decrypted before someone takes him out?
Logan gets in touch with Sarah Dewey, the Kingpin’s biographer, trying to find someone who can help him get dirt about Fisk off the flash drive he got last issue. Guilty because she feels that her book helped get the Kingpin elected, she’s fallen hard off the wagon. Logan takes her to get something to eat, but Bullseye shows up. Bullseye and Logan fight, but Bullseye’s ranged attacks take a toll on Logan’s ailing healing factor. Sarah is able to escape, taking the flash drive to a hacker she knows. Things don’t end well, because Bullseye has found them. Will Logan be able to save the day?
This is a really simple comic. There’s some set-up, some explanation of what’s going on, a fight, and a cliffhanger. Brisson doesn’t reinvent the wheel and that’s a good thing for a story like this. The whole premise of it is rather simple, so it doesn’t need to be groundbreaking. A problem is that characters keep getting introduced just to get killed off as Kingpin’s lackeys get closer to regaining the flash drive. It sells the dramatic stakes, but it’s also sort of repetitious. There are other ways to manufacture dramatic tension than to just kill anyone who can help advance the plot, especially when dealing with a character like Wilson Fisk. FIsk has always been resourceful and being the mayor of New York gives him an a lot of extra ways to mess with someone. Just sending out goons to kill whoever gets in his way is cliche for him and even in his old crime days would only have been a last resort. It takes something that could have made this story interesting, Logan fighting against the civil apparatuses of New York, into something run of mill.
That said, the fight is good. Writers have made a big deal of talking about Old Man Logan’s healing factor being weaker, but Brisson has run with it and that makes this fight a lot more interesting. In the past, a fight between Bullseye and Logan would have been pretty cool, but highly limited. As Wolverine; Logan’s healing factor has been hyper powerful for years. Any damage Bullseye could do would have healed almost immediately. Old Man Logan is a different story, though. He’s still recovering from the beating he took last issue and Bullseye is able to pile on the punishment. Even the environment works against Logan, as he took to an organic grocery store for her to get food from the hot bar. All of the conflicting smells in there mess up his sense of smell, making it easier for Bullseye to get the drop on Logan. All of this adds up and looks like this is a fight Logan can actually lose. While Brisson went cliche elsewhere to raise dramatic stakes in the story so far, this fight is perfectly constructed and keeps the issue from being completely bleh.
Dalibor Talajic’s art is better in this issue than in the last one, another positive for the comic. His figures and line work are stronger. There were a few places in the last issue where things got a little sketchy, but here the line work is stronger, eliminating that. The fight is well paced and it’s easy to tell what’s going on. Much like last issue, Talajic’s art isn’t amazing, but it works. It does what it needs to do, no more, no less.
This story had a lot of potential. It was interesting to think of what kind of ways Mayor Fisk would try to get the flash drive back, but it’s all become rather cliche. There were so many places this story could have gone. There still could have been a fight with Bullseye, but it could have been structured differently to make the whole thing better. The point of Wilson Fisk being mayor is for him to be a new kind of threat than he was before, but this story shows him just doing what he’s always done. The fight makes the whole thing better, but it doesn’t change the fact the story veers into same old, same old territory.
