I'm back! I've been done with school for almost two weeks now, but it's been hard to get back into the swing of things. Never fear, I plan on updating with much greater regularity from now on, even in my What If...? and The Order liveblogs.
I mentioned this in the first installment, but I think it's important enough to bear repeating: Captain Logan from X-Men Noir has absolutely nothing to do with Jim Logan, P.I., from this series. In my opinion, they actually represent fundamentally different aspects of 616 Wolverine — Captain Logan is the rough-and-tumble bad man, while Jim Logan is the brooding loner with a dark past. I think that's fascinating, really; Wolverine isn't close to the Flat Character so many people dismiss him as. So, keep that in mind as we sift through Wolverine Noir.
This cover, at least the variant, is terrific. Jim Logan stands sullenly in the rain, his fists, which bear blades between the fingers, dripping with blood. The normal cover is strange and I really have no idea what it's supposed to mean, so let's move on.
Narration begins over a shot of New York's Bowery district, just under the famous elevated railway. Our narrator is James Logan, who tells us that his father used to say "A man knows what Hell is. That's what separates us from the animals." Logan doesn't know a lot about Hell... but he knows the Bowery, and he can't imagine it being all that different. We see a newspaper, dated August 12, 1937, with the lead story concerning rising tension between China and Japan. Anyway, he says this actually used to be a classy neighborhood before the elevated railway was put up. Blocking out the sun, screeching and roaring, "spittin' red-hot ash and oil on the damned souls below." Everybody lives in the shadow of something, but by his money this place is about as low as a man can sink. We zero in on a door with "LOGAN & LOGAN Detective Agency" on the glass, advertising the duo as "The Best There Is At What We Do."
Behind that door, Jim Logan sits at his desk, staring at his partner, a big bald man playing with a small pocket knife. For about the eightieth time today, he's thinking about killing him. Logan describes his buddy for us — they call him Dog, probably because he thinks and acts like one. A whore threatened to cut him the other day because he was trying to sniff her garters. Logan takes a swig from a bottle on his desk and narrates that everyone thinks the two of them are brothers. It's the best lie he could come up with. Logan wishes he could kill Dog; he'd never have to watch him screw around with that damn toy knife again.
There's a knock at the door. A prospective client, a beautiful young woman described by Logan as "like diamonds in a coal mine" comes in. Yes, that's right; as with Daredevil Noir, we're getting the "from the minute she walked in I knew this dame was trouble" scene without a hint of irony. Dog asks if he can smell her shoes. Logan implores her to excuse that outburst, and she does. Her name is Mariko Yashida, and she wants to hire a detective. Dog says they're detectives, as if he's thinking "What a coincidence!", and asks if this is some Chinese thing. Logan corrects him on Mariko's lineage (Japanese, duh), and guesses she's from a wealthy family. Mariko's impressed with his detective skills already; she's in NY on business with her father. It's just that some people don't want them to carry out their business. Logan asks what this business is, but she dodges the question, saying she's been followed by men from a local flophouse for the last few days. She has money, and wants Logan to look into it. She also hands him a business card from the hotel she's staying at, with her phone number on it. You know, just in case.
Logan tries to play it cool, saying that she's being presumptuous by acting as if they've already taken the case. He tries to negotiate their fee when Mariko slaps $1000 in cash onto the desk and promises to reimburse him for any expenses. As she starts to leave, Logan warns her about the local roughnecks, "jack rollers". He admits they probably won't bother her since there's easier pickings all around, but she should try not to look too... rich. She says she doesn't have a lot of experience with that, but she can try.
Logan is extremely suspicious. A thousand dollars - ten hundreds. "Enough to cover a lot of lies." Dog takes the address to the flophouse and says he can handle this — he's a detective too, after all. Logan laughs and wishes him luck - and advises him not to get himself killed. Flashback! A teenage Logan prays silently. His father was a preacher, of the "fire and brimstone" school. Pops used to practice his sermons on young Logan, reasoning that if he could move a degenerate soul like his, he could save anyone. But every time, his fervor would reach such heights that he practically didn't know where he was. It was during those times that Logan would slip away.
On once such occasion, Logan accidentally (and literally) bumped into his neighbor Rose, who had dropped by to borrow some ice. The two of them had a tender moment, but were interrupted by the arrival of Dog. Dog was the son of the grounds keeper, and back then he had a full head of long blond hair. He was a crude bully, but he was a handsome and (relatively) articulate one. Logan was afraid of him. Rose wasn't. She cuts the conversation short and heads home. Dog follows after her, ignoring Logan's presence completely. Witnessing that scene, with his father's sermon ringing in his ears ("Beware your animal passions, my friends. Beware the Devil's Shroud, the shroud that hangs over us all."), for a split second, Logan experienced a sharp pang of fear. Fear that he wasn't a man... but an animal.
In the present, we see Dog going about his investigation. Logan narrates that his partner isn't quite the man he used to be. Dog is at the flophouse asking for the owner, a man named Creed. The men in the lobby are all framed in shadow, and at least one of them is concealing a weapon. Not a gun... a knife. Dog, apparently sensing trouble from the fact that the guy at the desk isn't answering and everyone's looking at him, smacks a nearby janitor to the ground. "You think I'm screwin' around? I want CREED!" Suitably terrified of the giant crazy man, the desk jockey relents, taking Dog upstairs to room 5B. Dog goes inside, slamming the door shut behind him.
Another flashback, this time to Logan's tutelage under his family's gardener, Smitty. Smitty fought in the Great War, and thereafter traveled around China and Japan. It was there that he learned about knives. He's got quite a collection. Smitty told Logan that in the old days, a novice samurai would receive his first real sword in a mock battle scenario. "But if we did that your father would skin me like a rabbit. So we'll have to use rattan sticks instead." From the look of them, rattan sticks are basically sticks carved to roughly resemble knives. They seem ideal for training and not intended for actual combat. Smitty lectured Logan throughout their sparring session - this isn't just a weapon. Used correctly, it's the path to spiritual and moral perfection. The samurai, Smitty said, used knives as well as swords, long blade and short in perfect harmony. He guessed it was the Irish in him, but he was always partial to the knife. Logan narrates that he knows what he means; it was in these sessions when he felt most alive.
Logan flew into a rage as his blood pumped, knocking Smitty to the ground and leaping on him. "It might not have been spiritual perfection, but it felt right. It felt like me." Just then, as he gained the advantage over Smitty for the first time, Rose walked in on them, with Dog on her tail. Logan remembers thinking that he needs to achieve that moral and spiritual perfection... for her. Dog eyed Smitty's collection of blades, grabbing at one of them. Smitty saw this, fought off Logan, and knocked a shuriken out of Dog's hand with a thrown stick. Smitty chastised him for trying to steal one of his blades, and just to impress a girl at that. Dog was lucky — the samurai would hunt dogs for sport. He told the kids to run off and tossed Dog a wooden toy knife, the very same one he plays with today, saying it's the only blade he'll ever be worthy of.
Back in the present, at that flophouse, at night, Logan is looking for Dog. He never came back after checking this place out, and Logan wants answers. He heads for room 5B after squeezing info out of a patron. As he's about to open the door, he gets an odd feeling, like there's something behind it he doesn't want to see. This line of thought is interrupted when some jack rollers approach him in the hallway. But as they lunge at him, armed with swords, he realizes no jack roller has moves like this. Only man he ever knew to fight like this was Smitty. Luckily, he learned a few tricks from the guy. He stabs one of the jack rollers in the stomach with knives held between his fingers - a few keepsakes from the master. "In the rotting heart of the Bowery, in the shadow of that ancient rage, the knives dance again." He cuts up his other assailant, and that's that. They didn't want him to go in there. He didn't want to go in there. Kicking the door down, he finds a bed frame, blood... and Dog's toy knife.
Logan sits for a moment and worries. He had wished Dog dead a thousand times, he hates him more than anyone in the world... but he's taken care of him for all these years, trying to make up for what happened. Logan heads back onto the street as he keeps thinking to himself. A lot of blood — he might be dead. Either way, he has to find him. "Because even here, in the lowest place on Earth a man can sink... I still owe him."
End of issue 1.
Okay, for those who aren't familiar, this series draws heavily from Origin, the miniseries that finally revealed Wolverine's, er, origin. There, Dog was the son of gardener Thomas Logan — whose name Wolverine took due to a subconscious memory that he was his real father. Dog was also hinted to be Victor Creed, Sabretooth, but Creed shows up here as a different character. Personally, I prefer to interpret Dog as being Sabretooth, I think it adds to the idea of he and Wolverine as hated enemies that they've known each other all this time.
