Fourteen months ago Mark Millar began his “Old Man Logan” arc for Marvel Comics: the story of Wolverine, now some fifty years in the future, eking out a hardscrabble existence with his wife and children in the countryside of an America gone straight to hell. And in all that time Wolverine – now simply known as “Logan” – hasn’t once popped his claws.

And then the cataract-plagued Hawkeye approached Logan with a business proposition: one that the former X-Man couldn’t turn down because he needed the rent money to pay off the inbred progeny of Bruce Banner. For the next several issues we watched Logan and Hawkeye tear across the remnants of the United States en route to New Babylon. And during the trip we finally learned what happened on the night the heroes fell, when Wolverine was brought down so hard that he forever forsook violence.

But it was ...

See if this makes any sense: in April readers of Marvel Comics got Wolverine #73, which had nothing to do with the current “Old Man Logan” arc and was mostly a promotional issue for the X-Men Origins: Wolverine movie. But last week Marvel delivered Wolverine #72…

I must ask aloud: was X-Men Origins: Wolverine really worth mucking up the publishing of what many are already calling the greatest comics story ever told about Wolverine?

Probably not. But be of good cheer: Wolverine #72 gets us back on track with “Old Man Logan”.

To recap: it’s been fifty years since “the night the heroes fell” and Wolverine hasn’t popped his claws once since. He has relegated himself to being simply “Logan”: a pacifist farmer scratching out a meager existence alongside his wife and children in the wastes of California. When the now-blind ex-Avenger Hawkeye approaches Logan with ...