Logan Image: Wolverine Heads to El Paso

20th Century Fox's drip-dropping of enigmatic black and white photos from Logan - previously known as Wolverine 3, the final X-Men solo movie featuring Hugh Jackman's version of Wolvie - has perhaps become a bit tedious for the fans following it, by this point; but the film's marketing campaign is showing signs of picking up speed soon. An image of costar Stephen Merchant as (it appears safe to assume) the albino mutant Caliban has now made it ways online. In addition, there's fair reason to wonder if a teaser and/or another telling screenshot from the film will arrive this month on Sunday, October 23rd (as in, X/23, a reference to the Wolverine-esque mutant who reportedly appears in Logan).

It's been established that Logan is an R-Rated movie and will have a superhero-meets-western vibe to its proceedings, in the vein of the famous neo-western/post-apocalyptic road trip Wolverine comic book storyline, Old Man Logan. The state of Texas in particular has served as a backdrop for a number of memorable neo-westerns released over the past decade (including, No Country for Old Men and this year's Hell or High Water), so it's fitting that Logan appears to take place in no small amount there too.

For those who are playing along at home: Fox previously released a Logan teaser image that shows an El Paso liquor store, as well as a photo that shows a newspaper clipping in Spanish (suggesting it too comes from El Paso County in Texas). Leaked photos from the Logan set have also shown Jackman's Wolverine driving a car that has Texas license plates - and in case that's not enough to "prove" the film largely takes place in that region of Texas, the latest teaser photo released for Logan - once again, through the official wponx Instagram account - flat-out shows a road sign that reads off the distance in miles to El Paso.

As for why Logan is in Texas: it's been reported that the new Wolverine movie takes place in the year 2024, a time when mutant-kind's numbers seem to be dwindling and young mutants are being turned into weapons (a la what happened to Logan) by a sinister government organization known as Transigen. Although it's been confirmed that an ailing Professor X (Patrick Stewart) joins Logan on his road trip adventure in this film, the pair are supposedly helped along the way by Caliban - and end up rescuing a young mutant girl (again, heavily-rumored to be a version of X-23 from the Marvel comics) from Transigen, along the way. However, this mission is all the more dangerous for Logan to carry out because his own mutant healing abilities have started to fade at long last.

It stands to reason that Transigen (or a black ops program like it) is based at a heavily-guarded facility that is located in Texas; one that was shown in a previously-released photo from Logan, no less. As indicated before, a desolate, semi-futuristic, version of Texas is as fitting a setting as any for a character like Wolverine - whose qualities as a Man With No Name-type loner were brought to the forefront in Logan director James Mangold's The Wolverine too - to make his final stand. And what better to serve as Logan's last mission than the task of saving someone not all that different from himself?