Old Man Logan TPB: This was a book I was very excited to read, as I had heard so many good things about it while it was coming out. Unfortunately, it didn't live up to the hype for me. Written by Mark Millar and drawn by Steve McNiven, it tells of a futuristic Hawkeye and Wolverine crossing a country controlled by various super-villains. Wolverine has been broken, becoming a pacifist (which annoyingly he reminds you every four pages or so) and Hawkeye is blind due to cataracts. Hawkeye coerces Wolverine to become his navigator on this cross-country trip, so that Hawkeye can try to create a place for himself in the new society. Unfortunately, Millar makes Hawkeye and Wolverine sound exactly the same, and he continually uses the same phrasing over and over. By the end of this book, if I never hear the phrase "pop his claws" again, I will die a happy man. Also, there was very little new in the story. It followed many of the same tropes as every other "future of the super-heroes you know and love" story. We run into Spider-Man's daughter, who coincidentally was Hawkeye's wife once, and Spidey's grand-daughter (Hawkeye's daughter). We see what happened to each of the major heroes as the main characters fight their way across country. And the ending was telegraphed from nearly the first page. The art was good, but there were many things where artistic license overrode realism and that took me out of the story for a panel or two each time. For example, in the scene of Hank Pym's gigantic skeleton, it showed that his finger bones were apparently fused together, as his fingers were pointing upright into the sky. Once the skin, muscle and tendons had gone, the bones should have fallen apart. At any rate, this book didn't live up to the excitement with which I anticipated it.
