Mark Millar's scripts for Kick-Ass, Fantastic Four, 1985, and Old Man Logan are all united by the common and quite obviously deliberate theme of parental responsibility and influence. This may come as something of a surprise to those who have Millar down as nothing but an self-interested schlock merchant, as comic's own Michael Bay, if not even Michael Winner. But each of the four books which followed Millar's completion of Civil War display a thematic concern with the family's obligation to create the best of worlds in even the worst of circumstances for its children. Of all the quartet, Old Man Logan seems the least likely to qualify for a Good Parenting award, for it's kneedeep in exploitation-movie blood'n'guts excesses. But underneath all that irredeemably blokish bloodletting and melodramatic saccharinity is, it appears, an entirely sincere, principled and endearingly mushy purpose. It's that which grounds this popcorn blockbuster in just enough feeling, smarts and conviction to make something satisfying out of a comic that seems determined to pretend that it's almost mindless.
I won't pretend that the final chapter of Old Man Logan reads at first as anything other than a grown fanboy's unashamed revelling in the most extravagant and well-worn traditions of the hang'em'high, blow-it-up-twice action movie. Reversals gleefully and yet predictably follow on from reversals, impossible victories pile endlessly into inescapable death-traps and round again, and yet the sheer loathsomeness of Millar and McNiven's antagonists compel the reader to stay the course just to be sure that the Hulk and his vile children get what's coming to them. Of all the villains in Millar's four post-Civil War books, it's the pantomime super-baddies of Pappy Banner's vast inbred clan of Hulksters who most obviously represent the very worst aspects of the writer's familial themes. Sadistic, cannibalistic, incestuous, pitiless; the radioactivity which has rotted away Banner's mind has resulted in a culture of entirely degenerate and yet superhumanly strong backwoodsmen where the sins of the father have been both genetically and culturally imposed upon the children. All of that irredeemable barbarism means that every snick and claw-rake on Wolverine's part is as perversely satisfying as it's entirely foreseeable. With McNiven's pages standing as enthusiastic and often particularly well-composed expressions of Millar's pulp-film obsessions, Old Man Logan encourages the reader to want the very worst for Wolverine's adversaries, and then delights in delivering exactly that.
Yet it's the presence of Millar's ethical themes which raise it Old Man Logan out of the ranks of the great mass of widescreen comic-book revenge fantasies. In that, Millar's constantly underlining one further principle which so many of those who discuss the centrality of the family in pop culture fail to accentuate. As with Kick Ass, Fantastic Four and 1985, Millar here purposefully emphasises the notion that the family isn't a refuge to retreat into without a care for the affairs of the world beyond it. . To him, it seems, the family's not an escape from the wider society, but an essential and necessarily active component of its wellbeing. It's telling, for example, that the utter corruption of the Republic is marked by Wolverine's desperate attempts to lose himself in nothing but his dirt-poor homestead with his inevitably doomed wife and children. Similarly, it's notable that Logan's story-closing crusade to free the future-America begins with his adoption of the last surviving child of poor, despicable Bruce Banner.
Underneath all the hyper-violence and the homages to everything from Unforgiven to Tremors, from Lone Wolf & Cub to Mad Max, from Jurassic Park to The Hills Have Eyes, Millar's mixed his more unashamedly frivolous ambitions with a genuinely serious and touching intent. Because of that, Logan's book-closing appearance as part-samurai, part-cowboy, off to the big city to save the world, becomes touching rather than humdrum, because he's carrying on his back a little green-skinned, gamma-irradiated child whose fate he's chosen to take responsibility for.
But because this is Millar, it seems that there has to be at least one scene of at the very least questionable taste. Here it's a single panel showing of a room in the Playboy Mansion of tomorrow, full of centrefold-ready young prostitutes who appear to be lightly and contentedly dozing after attending to the desires of a gang of Banner's boys. The gag, it seems, is that these brutish Hulks are so sexually potent that they can wear out any number of women, and the panel is very definitely being played as much for laughs as it is for the purpose of titillation. Certainly Steve McNiven has done all he can to ensure that the prone frames of the women are shown to be entirely untroubled, unmarked, and shining with the soft-porn appeal of post-partying cheesecakery. There's nothing there to indicate the presence of any kind of irony at all; the scene is simply supposed to be funny. Yet the various inbred members of the future Hulk's clan have never once shown themselves capable of doing anything that's not both intimidatingly violent and despicably cruel. How is it that these lovely, naked, slumbering and entirely untroubled women are shown to be so entirely untouched by the experience then? For what happened in that room would have had to have been an ugly and demeaning business at the very least, which leaves the mixture of sadism, machismo and stroke-mag wankery that's on show in this frame as an expression of nothing so much as misogyny. What we're being shown is the incident as the Banner boys would like it to be perceived, and that surely underscores what a wretched miscalculation the panel is.
It's a single if page-dominating panel lifted from 32 pages worth of story in Giant-Sized Wolverine: Old Man Logan. But it's just one more example of the kind of carelessness and insensitivity which has convinced Millar's many detractors that his work will ultimately never be anything other than tacky and shallow. It was the entirely unexpected, and therefore strangely transgressive, thrill of reading of the deaths of Gwen Stacey and the Green Goblin in a British reprint of Amazing Spider-Man #121 which helped to inspire the young Millar's lifelong love for the superhero comic. Perhaps that might explain something of his apparent desire to perpetually contradict in his work the same liberal values which he passionately espouses in his public statements. Heads must be turned, a kerfuffle must be made, the essential biting spice added to the brew. Whatever, it seems that Mark Millar often can't resist that next offending moment.
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