I’d have never brought OML to the 616 after Secret Wars. Hear me out...

- Instead, I’d have gone ahead and broken OG Logan out of his adamantium tomb through some sort of Secret Wars cosmic tomfoolery where OML was somehow able to touch his consciousness and revive him as the world faded to white again and was rebuilt.

- So our Logan is alive, but his healing factor isn’t working like it used to. So he’s looking older, a little grayer (but not 9000 years old like some artists drew OML). His memories are a mess. He remembers OML’s future, so his new solo book by Lemire and Sorrentino (simply called “Logan”) starts in almost exactly the same way as Old Man Logan #1 did, with him trying to prevent that future and being super mixed up about which reality he’s in.

- From there, things transpire much the same way, with Logan rejoining the X-men but no longer going by Wolverine. Laura still takes up the mantle to honor his legacy at first, but once she finds him alive he tells her to keep it. That he’s getting old and no longer the best there is and she’s the Wolverine now. That’s the status quo, for awhile.

- Then we get to Return of Wolverine, which is not this meaningless story about Wolverine coming back to life (since it feels like he never left anyway with OML having been running around in his place), but rather it’s this big sprawling epic which involves Soteira and Persephone and their experiments and sinister agenda (whatever that is); and it drags in just about everyone you can imagine who was ever connected with Weapon X in any meaningful way (Creed, Wade, Deathstrike, Fantomex, Laura).

- Return of Wolverine then becomes about how Logan got his groove back and became “The Wolverine” again, in spirit as much as anything. His mind gets “purged” along the way of many of the memories he’s been carrying around with him, some from other realities or timelines (i.e., we find that his mind is a mess because on top of a century’s worth of his own memories he has memories from the DoFP future, from the House of M reality and the OML reality, etc.). Soteira basically “breaks” his mind at some point in this deal — and we get an epic berserker rage scene when they do this — and Logan comes out the other side with all those memories having been lost as a result.

- So... by the end of this mini we’ve got Logan back in the cowl as Wolverine, and back to basics. His healing factor isn’t as fast as it used to be, so it’s more like it was in the 80s anyway. Where he could not shrug off mortal wounds in seconds, but rather hours or even days to fully recover. So he has to rely more on his skills and “being the best there is at what he does.” His memories have been wiped again, not to the point where he doesn’t remember anything at all, but he cannot recall anything before the Weapon X project. There are still flashes of things, but he doesn’t know if they’re real or memory implants or just “fever dreams” of other timelines. Again, this is a reset to the character as he was before House of M. Before Origin even. Sure, the readers know the story from Origin now, but Logan does not. And he never really told anyone much about it when he got his memories back after House of M, so it doesn’t get referenced anymore.