Old Man Logan 46/47

Please indulge me as I correct an error I made 18 months ago.

In a post from June 2019, I stated that the Alpha Flight special called True North was the first significant appearance by Guardian in the previous five years. That was actually not the case.

Guardian and a few members of Alpha Flight (the real one) appeared in a two-part story in the Old Man Logan book in 2018. I either whiffed on it or ignored it at the time, assuming that it would have been some future or alternate version of the team.

I'm glad I gave it a longer look, even if it was more two years later. It was arguably the character's best guest appearance (as opposed to a single panel cameo) in quite some time. And you don't need to know the Old Man Logan back story to follow it.

Here are some highlights, if you did too. As usual, click on the images to enlarge them. 

Mac shows up early on in the issue for a scheduled pick up of Logan.

Sweet ride! 

They head to the town of Shag Harbour in Nova Scotia. It has been overwhelmed by some sort of purple plant creature. 

Mac finds the source and collects a sample from it to study on the ship. 

So he exits from the story for a spell. While he's studying away, the actions of the rest of Alpha Flight, Logan and a handful of remaining townspeople cause the creature to stir to life and lash out.

We move on issue #47 after Mac is called back down to help out. 

Whoa, slow down on the technical jargon, Poindexter! 😄

They discover that fire can cause the plant creature harm (that hardly seems like a leap of logic). Logan jumps in the middle of it and lights a number of gas cans in order to kill it.

Of course, getting out of the middle of that conflagration is a more difficult deal, unless you have the country's top petrochemical engineer and his awesome flight suit around.

In a number of ways, this book was similar to Alpha Flight's appearance in a few issues of Amazing X-Men in 2014. That one also started with the team investigating a mystery in a small town in Canada.

This Logan story, written by Ed Brisson, was far more coherent and, in my opinion, respectful. In the X-Men issues, you'd have sworn that the writers had no clue as to what Alpha Flight had been up to in the past decade, and didn't much care.

While I am personally not particularly crazy about the direction in which Brisson took Guardian in True North, that is not the case with either that story or these two Logan books. The team's recent history is acknowledged and built upon. I'm thankful to Mr. Brisson for keeping the character in circulation to some extent.