The following contains spoilers for Old Man Logan #50 by Ed Brisson, Ibraim Roberson, Neil Edwards, Carlos Lopez, and Cory Petit. 


Old Man Logan has quietly been one of Marvel's more fun and delightfully violent books in recent memory. Sadly, the adventures of the dimension displaced Wolverine are coming to an end when Dead Man Logan arrives later this month, leaving his current solo book to set up his eventual demise.

The "King of Nothing" arc has seen Logan more or less on his last leg thanks to losing both his adamantium claws and his healing factor, and the Regenix drug meant to replace his healing isn't working at full capacity. That would be bad enough on its own, but Logan has also been spending this arc going up against the Maestro, a Bruce Banner from an alternate universe who Logan has fought many times. Having been stopped in his quest to create a paradise for Hulk, the Maestro has instead fled to Canada and taken over the town of Fort Wells, where he's gleefully beaten Logan so bad he had to heal for a week.

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Eventually, Logan gets freed by an uprising of townsfolk who quickly give him his last shot of Regenix so he can fight the Maestro at full power. While the townsfolk who have been organizing against the Maestro deal with taking back Fort Wells, Logan tracks the evil Hulk to his pod he used to escape to Earth-616. All Logan has to do is take it to his original universe before Maestro returns to his own home, but the pod gets smashed during their tussle. For the fourth or fifth time in his life, our old Logan fights a Hulk, only this battle has the most definitive ending of them all, as he cuts the Maestro's head clean off his body.

"King of Nothing" is something of a dark sequel to Logan's first two arcs, "Berzerker" and "Bordertown." There, he fought then-Hulk Amadeus Cho, thinking the kid was the Banner responsible for ruining his reality, and now he's fighting an evil version of Banner in his book's last issue. He's defending a Canadian town from evil, same as he did for the town where his future wife Maureen lived in "Bordertown." And where he emerged into 616 naked and confused in NYC, he ends his book shirtless and near death in the Canadian wilderness.

Unlike his younger self or his daughter Laura, aka X-23, the older Logan works best as a solitary creature getting caught up in events he'd rather not. Even though he's always been regarded as "the other Wolverine," his tales have managed to feel fresh and interesting because of his age and the circumstances of his life. Would Laura Kinney or the younger Logan get caught up in a Purifier attempt to destroy the X-Mansion with the help of online dating? Likely not, but an older Logan who can be the grandpa to the newer roster of mutants fits nicely into an adventure like that, or a trip to a Brood-infested space station, or any number of other story ideas.

The Old Man line will keep continuing, with Hawkeye's tale nearing its end, and Guardian of the Galaxy Peter Quill getting a solo title of his own geriatric adventures. Random as they seem, they do allow for heroes to actually age and their current adventures to have genuine weight. It's a shame that Logan will soon expire because an older hero is something that the Marvel Universe could certainly use more of, especially one who gets caught up in all sorts of shenanigans.