COMIC DETAILS
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Comic Description:
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Logan's Run 6 Modern
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Grade:
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9.8
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Page Quality:
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WHITE
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Certification #:
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2000073016
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Owner:
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Qalyar
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SET DETAILS
Owner's Description
What a strange book.
Issue #5 concluded the comic adaptation of the film adaptation of William F. Nolan's novel (whew!), but Marvel decided they had a hot thing on their hands, and wanted to continue the story beyond the movie's conclusion. However, that reach exceeded their grasp. As the book's editorial statement says, "...tight deadlines -- brought on by further contractual negotiations with Hollywood -- made us limit ourselves this issue to a twelve-page epilogue..."
John Warner takes over writing duties for these post-film issues, and it quickly becomes clear that he's familiar with the original novel, and willing to introduce elements that were discarded from the film adaptation. More on that with issue #7. In the meantime, the Logan's Run story here isn't exactly bad, and largely serves as setup for storylines that would presumably have been explored in an ongoing series. The people lack any leadership; can they turn to the Sandmen, who are now symbols of death and oppression? The broken domes are allowing rain to begin to flood parts of the City. An army of feral children is beginning to assemble. Can Logan 5 get a backup computer working to fix everything? Not everything works quite as well as I think Warner would have liked, and the entire bit about reversing the polarity of Carousel to levitate into the undercity is definitely not the book's (nor the series') finest hour.
In order to pad that twelve-page story out to the length of a standard comic book, they arbitrarily inserted a story about Thanos and Drax (here, called only the Destroyer). In this backup feature, Thanos decided to be arbitrarily mean to an already set-upon planet, by crushing its Final Flower beneath his boot to cause planetary-scale despair. On the way to his flower stomping, he throws a couple of pilgrims off a cliff. Drax, overcome with memories of his own family, saves them instead of the flower. They are... not particularly grateful.
It's a pretty good story, especially for early on in Thanos's character development. But Drax is sort of a mess here. His origins in this story don't match up well with his origin stories elsewhere; not even his original name! I suppose there's an argument to be made that this Destroyer -- Art Sampson -- is a different character than Drax -- originally Arthur Douglas. But no one really seems to entertain that possibility. It's just another bit of "early installment weirdness". If you want to read it in a more accessible source, "The Final Flower!" was reprinted in 2013's Silver Surfer: Rebirth of Thanos TPB, the 2013 FCBD Infinity book, and True Believers: Thanos the First #1 (2018). "The Final Flower!" has been deemed by collectors to be the "first solo Thanos story". Regardless, people seem to care about that designation, including CGC. Mostly, that just serves to push the market value up.
Also, unfortunately for these last two books, Tom Sutton -- perhaps best known for Vampirella and Planet of the Apes -- replaced George Pérez for interior art. There's nothing at all wrong with Sutton's work; he was a skilled artist with a developed style and a large, well-deserved body of work. But in my opinion, at least, it doesn't quite fit here. It certainly doesn't hew as closely to the film as Pérez's pencils did. But since this issue sees the story moving beyond the film, maybe that was intended.
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