Call for Papers and Presentations The Department of Popular Culture and the Browne Popular Culture Library at Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, Ohio are proud to announce the Spider-Man in Popular Culture Conference on Friday, September 29 and Saturday, September 30, 2023.  The Spider-Man in Popular Culture conference aims to examine Spider-Man in Popular Culture in all mediums and media.  It is intended to serve as a space for academics, graduate students, comic industry professionals, retailers and fans to engage in dialogue about topics related to Spider-Man in its many media forms, mediums and cultural influence in popular culture and beyond. The scope of this conference is deliberately broad, with the intention of highlighting the interdisciplinary nature and many different avenues of research possible related to Spider-Man in Popular Culture.  
See the conference website for complete details. Deadline for submissions is Friday, March 31, 2023.  

Introduction
Director James Mangold’s live-action superhero film1 (Brown 5) Logan (2017), in its early marketing, was billed as the last time Australian actor Hugh Jackman would play the role of superhero Wolverine, or James “Logan” Howlett (Olsen).2 Jackman has played Wolverine for 17 years and has appeared in two solo films and in four X-Men films.3 As a dominant character in the X-Men films starting with the 2000 X-Men film, Wolverine is a well-defined hero with a well-established track record for popularity, licensing, (McAllister, Gordon, Jancovich 110) and sequels. Even with this history, Logan is a different superhero movie with a clever plot twist hinted at by the first theatrical poster released for the film on October 5, 2016.4 Logan introduces “X23-23”/Laura,5 a pre-adolescent mutant who holds the potential for replacing Wolverine/Logan.6 While Logan chronicles the death of superhero Wolverine/Logan, it is also a dramatization of the initiation of Wolverine/Logan’s daughter, X-23/Laura into live-action film superheroics.7

Logan and Laura’s “Initiation” into Superheroics
Logan takes place in 2029 with few mutants living and with no new mutants having been born in the last 25 years. Logan, or the Wolverine, is working as a limousine driver in El Paso, Texas. Wolverine/Logan and mutant tracker Caliban (Stephen Merchant) care for Professor X/Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart), now a nonagenarian, who often loses control of his telepathic abilities, paralyzing everyone near him with the exception of Wolverine. All three mutants live in an abandoned smelting plant in Northern Mexico along the Mexican border. The action of Logan begins when 11-year old X-23/Laura (Daphne Keen) is brought to the attention of Logan through Gabriela Lopez (Elizabeth Rodriguez), a nurse who cared for mutant children such as Laura born in the “belly of Mexican girls” impregnated with DNA samples from several mutants who lived in the late 2010s and early 2020’s. The Alkali-Transigen Project of which Lopez was affiliated for 10 years, is a subsidiary of Alkali Corporation, an American-owned company, administered by Dr. Zander Rice (Richard E. Grant) and is located in Mexico City, Mexico (“Transigen”). The Alkali-Transigen Project is approved and funded under the pretense of a “pediatric cancer study.” However, in fact, Laura and the other mutant children are the true focus of Rice’s “pharmaceutical study.”
Charles is the first to know of Laura through his telepathic conversations with her prior to Lopez’s encounter with Logan. Charles tells Logan that these mutants need Logan’s help and that he knows “speciation when he sees it” referring to the new mutants. Caliban comments on the fact Charles is “communicating with someone,” although Logan does not believe Charles or Caliban. Charles and Logan learn from a video on Lopez’s cellphone that as part of the “X-23” project, Laura and the other children were created to be soldiers, their “bodies, weapons” to kill. As the children grew older, they became more difficult to control and they refused to fight. Since they refused to fight, they were considered to be “useless.” With the completion of the “X-24” project (“something…without a soul”), the nurses were told that the “study” would be shut down. Lopez and other nurses helped many children escape from the Transigen compound. Lopez searches for and finds “the Wolverine” working his chauffeur job at a funeral gravesite. Lopez requests Logan’s help because Rice’s Reavers are searching for the mutant children to return them to Transigen to kill them. Lopez believes that Logan could protect and take Laura safely to “Eden,” supposedly a place “in the north” for mutants described in the X-Men comic books in Laura’s possession.
Laura’s role in Logan is to be successfully initiated into live-action film superheroics (see Brown, “American Western” 83-4). As doubled-protagonists, Laura is the initiate-superhero to superhero Logan. To accomplish this change in her social status, Laura undergoes an informal ritual of passage (van Gennep 2-3, 10-11), specifically an initiation (van Gennep 3, 65) into superheroics.8 Rituals of passage mark the “passage from one situation to another” (van Gennep 10). Laura is passing from being an untrained superhero to being a trained superhero. Laura’s informal initiation process resembles a heroic monomythic adventure. Through Rice’s “study,” Laura was created and trained to be a “soldier.” Being trained and functioning as a soldier is very different from being trained and functioning as a superhero in four ways. First, soldiers are placed in a strict hierarchical environment where their authorities must be obeyed at all times. Second, soldiers do what they are told to do, individual decision-making is discouraged for the most part. Third, soldiers do not receive a full understanding or explanation of why they are doing what they are doing. Fourth, soldiers undergo tests to assess their skills. These tests are not considered to be initiation rituals. Superheroes, on the other hand, have personal autonomy and authority and exercise extreme levels of self-control. Superheroes understand and recognize governmental and military authorities but they do not necessarily obey their commands. Superheroes are at all times protecting and defending a community or society rather than defending the interests of themselves, governments, nations, businesses, and corporations. Individual decision-making is typical superheroic behavior. A good soldier exhibits none of these superheroic characteristics while acting in the line of duty.
Formal, culturally proscribed rituals include specific actions, personas, and events. On the whole, initiation rituals exemplify “transition, since they have well marked and protracted marginal or liminal phases” (Turner 95). Laura’s informal initiation displays several characteristics of transition but is not specifically a ritual. For one, initiation rituals require the participation of the adults or those individuals who have attained the status to which the initiates are voluntarily (or involuntarily) seeking to attain. Initiation rites occur within a society or community holding unifying beliefs, values, and norms. No matter the ritual, there is a common understanding by all the people of the purpose of the ritual, when the ritual must occur, how it must occur, and by and for whom. Unlike formal rituals in societies and communities in real time and space, however, Laura’s community in Logan is rather small, only composed of Gabriela, Logan, Charles, and Laura’s mutant friends. Further, Laura’s community is ineffective as its members are unattached and disconnected and its structure is unorganized and unfocused. Since there is no established community or society, the purpose of Laura’s initiation is not established or articulated formally in the film. Even with these differences, the significance of Laura’s role and her function as related to Logan is best explained as an informal initiation. Three themes contextualize the significance of Laura’s purpose and function and demonstrate that she is undergoing an informal initiation in Logan: (1) Logan and Laura’s relationship, (2) Laura’s learning experiences, and (3) Logan and X-24’s deaths.