Beneath a starlit sky, the domes sprawl: large, larger than even Buckminster Fuller ever imagined, in those days when men first walked the moon . . . They dwarf the countryside, great gleaming half-spheres of light–and within the domes, the source of that light: the city. The city has no name, and needs none. It is simply–the city. The only city its people know–and perhaps, in a way, this explains what the city’s become. Perhaps it also explains–why the runners run. –Logan’s Run no. 1, cover dated January 1977
The 1976 film Logan’s Run is a classic of a certain era of science fiction (the last gasp of that era, some might say). Before it was an MGM movie, it was a 1967 novel by authors George Clayton Johnson and William F. Nolan, and for a few months after the movie came out it was a Marvel comic book, scripted by Gerry Conway in the first issue and David Alan Kraft in subsequent issues, with art by George Perez (pencils) and Klaus Janson (inks). Adaptations of science fiction films and novels were in Marvel’s wheelhouse in the 1970s: along with original sci-fi and fantasy titles, they were a continuous source of non-superhero action and thrills, even if that sometimes meant expanding on original works for “continuing adventures” or emphasizing thrills over the more cerebral source material. (Marvel also produced Jack Kirby’s mind-bending adaptation of 2001: A Space Odyssey; the rights to both 2001 and Logan’s Run were negotiated at the same time.) The following year, Star Wars would turn out to be the perfect vehicle for Marvel’s expansionist approach–in fact, the long-running Star Wars series is often given credit for keeping Marvel afloat in the late 1970s when the entire comics industry was suffering–but Logan’s Run was also part of the attempt to launch an open-ended adventure series on the back of a popular film.
Logan’s Run is set in the twenty-third century, in a domed city sealed off from the outside world; the population of the dome lives a life of easy pleasure, regulated by a central computer and kept ignorant of both their history and the state of the world outside. There seems to not even be a concept of “outside,” although this is such a work of 1970s pessimism that even a futuristic utopia has areas of urban blight, such as the “personal risk zone” Cathedral, where feral children rule the territory as a gang. The surface perfection of the city comes at a price, including a strict form of population control: every citizen has a crystal embedded in his or her palm, and its color indicates both their phase of life and how much time they have left. In every public space, a crystalline hand sculpture reminds citizens of the central importance of this device. When a citizen reaches the age of thirty (twenty-one in the novel), the “life clock” begins to pulse, instructing them to report to Carrousel, a public ritual in which they will either be “renewed” and given more life, or “flame out” and die. Not everyone can accept the gamble of Carrousel, and some of them try to escape their fate. Logan-5 (played by Michael York in the film) is a “Sandman,” a specialized police officer whose sole duty is to track down and terminate these “runners” with his “sleeper gun” (a blaster).
Logan’s confidence in his profession (for which he was raised from childhood) begins to waver when he recovers a charm in the shape of an ankh, the Egyptian looped cross, from one of his latest targets. He holds on to it out of curiosity; later, browsing the “availability circuit” (the “hot singles in your area” of the twenty-third century, with the added perk of letting compatible partners beam directly into each other’s apartments), he meets a woman named Jessica (Jenny Agutter in the film) wearing the same symbol. Is there a connection? Nothing happens between the two–Jessica logged on to the availability circuit in a moment of weakness and regrets being chosen by a Sandman–but the girl and her strange attitudes sticks in Logan’s mind. It is when Logan is summoned to a one-on-one with the central computer and given the assignment to find and destroy the supposed “Sanctuary” represented by the runners’ ankh, and four of his remaining years are drained from his life clock, forcing him to become a runner himself, that his suppressed doubts come to the surface. Does anyone ever renew, or is it all a sham? Is there actually a Sanctuary outside the city? With Jessica’s help, he escapes the city, his former Sandman partner Francis (Richard Jordan) hot on their trail.
Compared to some adaptations, the comic book version of Logan’s Run is quite faithful to the film: the main differences are in pacing and emphasis rather than changes to the plot. The film’s elaborate Carrousel sequence is reduced to a couple of pages; a scene in which Logan and Jessica escape to the city’s underground through a service door hidden in a sex club is completely elided in the comics, but in other places the city’s ethos of free love is clearly implied. The Old Man they meet in the ruins of Washington D. C. (Peter Ustinov in the film) spends a lot less time muttering and quoting T. S. Eliot in the comics than he does in the movie (in both film and comics, however, his age, and the fact that he knew and was raised by his parents, are sources of wonder to Logan and Jessica). By contrast, fight scenes and other bits of action are extended, with at least one big set piece per issue, and most issues build up to a cliffhanger. (The covers are working overtime to sell this action-packed version of the story: the first issue’s cover shows the ubiquitous crystalline hand sculpture coming to life and chasing our heroes like the claw of a gigantic monster: of course that doesn’t literally happen in the movie or the comics, but it captures the theme of the story very well.)
The comics do explain one detail from the film’s shooting script that the finished film ended up cutting: during his confrontation with the juvenile delinquents who run wild in the Cathedral district, the “Cubs,” Logan is attacked by the oldest, Billy, who shoves a cloth in Logan’s face and says only one word, “muscle.” In issue no. 2 of the comic, we learn that “muscle” is the Cubs’ drug of choice. “It’s unauthorized. Speeds up your reflexes,” Logan explains to Jessica. “It’s no good for anyone over sixteen, though–it would shake you and me to pieces.”
In The Sci-Fi Movie Guide, Chris Barsanti notes “The f/x, thought impressive at the time, were made instantly obsolete with the release of Star Wars the following year.” I think that’s a little unfair: Logan’s Run is still a very good-looking film, with impressive production values, although the wide shots of the EPCOT-like cityscape are clearly miniatures reminiscent of Japanese tokusatsu or Italian space movies like Wild, Wild Planet. And while Logan’s Run has been lumped in with the other downbeat pre-Star Wars sci-fi of the ’70s, it isn’t particularly meditative: it’s a man-on-the-run film, like Minority Report or a science fiction The Fugitive, full of chases, fight scenes, suspenseful traps, and narrow escapes. True, things slow down once Logan and Jessica get out of the city, but it is nevertheless a popcorn movie through and through.
Of course, in comic book form there is no worry about expensive special effects, and the city’s geometric details stand out nicely. The art is generally good (like many Bronze Age books, it is rather heavily inked, and the combination of Perez and Janson looks quite a bit like Carmine Infantino’s work instead of the feathery detail Perez would become known for in the 1980s). Since the comics were published in the fall (the cover date indicated when comics were to be removed from news stands, so they generally came out a few weeks beforehand) after the film’s June release, the visuals are also more faithful to the finished film than is often the case, in stark contrast to the differences between the Star Wars comic (which was published in the spring to drum up interest in the movie) and film (which was being tinkered with by director George Lucas up to the last minute before its premiere).
The perception is that Logan’s Run is grown-up science fiction and Star Wars is kid’s stuff, but clearly Logan’s Run had appeal to kids as well (what is more appealing to the adolescent than the allure of “mature” media?). With the passage of time it’s easier to see what Star Wars has in common with the science fiction of its time, most notably a blend of naturalistic acting and countercultural skepticism amidst the futuristic sets and costumes. What really divides Logan’s Run from Star Wars is its conceit of dealing with real-world concerns–overpopulation, sexual freedom, man’s relationship to the environment–in a fanciful way, as opposed to the heroic self-actualization of Luke Skywalker. For all its dazzling surface elements, Logan’s Run is in the social-commentary lineage of Planet of the Apes and Soylent Green, an approach that became unfashionable once Star Wars renewed interest in the space opera of Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers. One is reminded of Michael Moorcock’s rebuke of J. R. R. Tolkien: “Jailers love escapism. What they hate is escape.”
The sort of allegory represented by Logan’s Run, in which a society sealed off from external contact lives by one or two arbitrary rules, has never really died off either, even though it would be a few decades before such high concepts returned to big-budget filmmaking (the Divergent series is a recent, if ill-fated, example). In fact, I think the passage of time has been kind to Logan’s Run. Some of the cultural details that probably a seemed a little too on-the-nose in the ’70s–the city’s obsession with youth being a logical extension of the saying “never trust anyone over thirty,” or the 24/7 disco lifestyle–are now simply part of the fabric of its world: eccentric, perhaps, but all of a piece.
There are some obvious similarities to Brave New World, with a population lulled by drugs and sex, but I am also reminded of George Pal’s 1960 adaptation of The Time Machine: the citizens of Logan’s Run‘s twenty-third-century city are much like the childlike Eloi of H. G. Wells’ year 800,000, down to the brightly-colored toga-like wrappings they wear. In Pal’s version, the Eloi are conditioned to associate the arrival of the predatory Morlocks with blaring sirens, the racial memory of long-ago warnings of air raids and nuclear attacks. In Logan’s Run, the great insight of the dome’s designers, and the computer that runs the city, is that with enough conditioning the Eloi will offer themselves up for slaughter at the appointed time: no Morlocks required.
On the other hand, the heavy-handed symbolism of Jessica and Logan ending up in a ruined U. S. Capitol building, “the people’s house,” not to mention the final standoff between Logan and Francis, using a ragged American flag as a weapon, is very much in the style of post-Watergate science fiction; in the fallout of the turbulent 1960s, and with Vietnam still a raw, recent memory, it seems likely that many Americans in the Bicentennial year were wondering just what the future held. While the particular expression of those anxieties marks Logan’s Run as a film of its time, the continued use of American symbolism in horror and science fiction films like The Purge series indicates that those anxieties are still with us, unresolved.
As mentioned above, there was interest in continuing a Logan’s Run comics series beyond the events of the film, a practice that was not unusual. Although Gerry Conway’s editorial in issue no. 1 states that a four-issue adaptation was planned, ultimately it took five issues to adapt the movie. In the same editorial, Conway teases answers to questions like “Are there any other domes, besides Logan’s?” and “Is there a sanctuary somewhere, after all?” These are natural jumping-off points for the kind of “further adventures” readers had come to expect (Nolan would write a pair of sequels to the original novel, but not until after the film had been made). Two more issues were published, exploring the fallout of Logan’s decisions and the apparent destruction of the domed city at the end of Logan’s Run, but MGM felt that Marvel had overstepped the terms of their license and the book was abruptly cancelled, ending on a cliffhanger. (Issue no. 6 is notable for a backup story featuring a then lesser-known character named Thanos in his first solo adventure, an inclusion that inflated the value of the book, at least for a while.) Like its self-contained setting, the series exists now as a time capsule of the future as seen from the vantage of the mid-1970s.
Medleyana 