Usually the rule is that the event comic is a pile of crap while some of the tie-ins are surprisingly decent, even good. I’m not sure about the other spinoffs but The Logan Legacy tie-in to the Death of Wolverine manages to be even worse than the underwhelming main event.
X-23, Daken (when did he come back from the dead?), Sabretooth, Lady Deathstrike and Mystique - all characters tied to Wolverine in different ways - are somehow lured to some castle in Croatia where they’re held captive. They’re told by a mysterious stranger that Dr Abraham Cornelius, the guy behind the Weapon X programme, experimented on them too, implanting four trigger words in their brains.
The first puts them to sleep, the second puts them into a suggestive trance, the third kills them, and the fourth... is unknown. The stranger stands around their cage while they each tell a single-issue story about what they did when they heard Wolverine was dead. There are contrived thin plots - and then there’s The Logan Legacy.
Charles Soule writes the first setup issue and the concluding chapter while Tim Seeley writes X-23’s story, Kyle Higgins writes Sabretooth, Marguerite Bennett writes Lady Deathstrike, Ray Fawkes writes Daken, and James Tynion IV writes Mystique. Soule’s writing is unusually spotty but, given the useless premise, he really has nothing to work with. The others, if you’re familiar with their work, are hardly A-list talents and produce sub-standard comics in this volume.
This whole book screams gratuitous cash-in and an extremely lazy one at that. None of the stories are worth reading at all. X-23 cries, fights some people, then gets over Wolverine’s death. Sabretooth is so fucked in the head he just keeps killing people he believes are Wolverine. Lady Deathstrike kills gangsters, Daken kills gangsters, Mystique kills some SHIELD personnel - all of it adding up to one big zero.
I was crying out for anything: some variation in the stories, a little imagination, a clever scene - but no, it’s just these characters doing what they’re always doing in the most sober tone possible. X-23 is in an even skimpier outfit than usual and Daken’s new look is even gayer than when he kissed his ex-boyfriend.
The art feels rushed, the writing is dreary filler, and the book is needless preamble to Wolverines - skip, skip, skip, skip this pointless shit! However given that the majority of Wolverine’s solo books were terrible, The Logan Legacy is indeed a fitting legacy to the character.
Death of Wolverine: The Logan Legacy
It bugs me that this volume sounds so pointless, because I really think that Higgins and Tynion are the most underrated writers at DC. Maybe these guys just can't write Marvel.
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