If you've been reading the "Logan Dies" storyline, you'll know that it's very, very silly indeed.  And it had me worried for a moment, as it seemed to be on the verge of embedding something monumentally stupid into Wolverine's character.

The story attempts to explain away all the times that Wolverine has healed from obviously fatal injuries.  We've been seeing it increasingly in recent years, not least from Marc Guggenheim, the writer of this storyline.  In a sort of injury inflation, Wolverine has gone from a character who can recover from torture after a good six months of stories, to somebody who can rebuild himself from a skeleton in a matter of panels.

It ought to go without saying that this was a very bad direction for the character, because invulnerable heroes usually aren't that interesting.  They're never in any credible danger.  Yes, of course, we the readers know that Wolverine's never going to die because he's too popular and he's got his own series.  That's not the point.  It's good enough that we still believe he could die within the logic of the story.  As long as the characters believe it, and as long as we still have to figure out how he survives, he still works.

But when you make him functionally invulnerable, you're dealing with a very different sort of character, of a sort that has traditionally had to be given an achilles heel (kryptonite, and so forth) to make them workable superheroes at all.  That style of story doesn't sit very well with Wolverine, who is at his best as a "street level" character.

And for a while, I had a horrible feeling that Guggenheim was trying to cement this dreadful nonsense as Wolverine's status quo.  Worse yet, his explanation involved angels of death and battles in the afterlife.  It was the sort of story I envisaged people groaning at for years to come.

But in fact, my first theory turns out to have been right all along.  It's the exact opposite.  Guggenheim really wants to close off this avenue altogether.  In order to do that, he needs an explanation (even a stupid one) so that he can block it off for future writers.  That leaves us back where we should have been all along: with a much less powerful healing factor, and a Wolverine who can be killed by normal weapons.  And as for Azrael, the Angel of Death, well, he's served his purpose and we need never mention him again.

I thoroughly approve of the destination.  I'm less convinced of the route by which we got here.  Frankly, if it had been me, I'm not sure I'd have bothered giving such a detailed explanation; I'd have chalked it up to artistic licence, and simply stopped doing that sort of scene, until I'd redefined his power levels at a sensible level.  At most, I might have done some sort of serious injury as a justification for lowering his powers, in the course of a different story altogether. 

The main reason for not giving such a detailed explanation is that you end up with rather silly pseudo-mystical stuff like this, which doesn't belong in a Wolverine story at all.  What's more, you end up devoting an entire storyline to a concept that you're trying to get rid of precisely because it's lousy.  "Logan Dies" charges headlong into that trap, with an story that makes internal sense, and gets to the right place, but just doesn't suit the character at all.

It also has some strange structural issues.  Shingen turns up out of nowhere as a main villain in the final cliffhanger, even though he hasn't been seen in over twenty years.  And an inordinate amount of this week's issue is given over to a flashback recapping the story to date.  I'm all for explaining the plot to newcomers, but four pages just to recap the arc?

This is an oddity.  As a story, it's better off forgotten.  But it does leave the series, and the character, in a better condition.  And I do appreciate the effort being made to resolve this problem properly, instead of sweeping it under the carpet.  Still, by the very nature of the project, the result is a strange plot built around a bad idea.

Rating: B-

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