With a TV series landing on Syfy in April, it would be difficult to fault veteran comics writer Beau Smith for wanting to sync up new forthcoming Wynonna Earp series from IDW with the show that’s likely to be seen by far more people.
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Nearing 20 years old, Smith’s supernatural Western revolves around a descendant of the famed Wyatt Earp, the titular Wynonna, who is a member of the US Marshals’ “Black Badge” division, a special group that deals with paranormal threats.
And while the first look at Wynonna in 1996 was of a buxom, scantily-clad blonde with a lot of special firearms, this latest iteration of the character looks a bit more like the Syfy show: she’s a brunette with a leather jacket and a hair trigger. Smith says, though, that while he’s happy to have the two versions of his character come together, it wasn’t actually planned that way.
“It ended up being a collaboration type of thing that me or Emily Anders, who is the showrunner and the head writer on the TV series, that we did not plan, but it just seemed to naturally happen, which is excellent,” Smith said during an interview with ComicBook.com, the full text of which will run soon. “Pre-Wynonna Earp — anything before the series that starts this week — I had always written Wynonna at the peak of her career. She was 35 to 40 years old. You know comic books well: there’s not a lot of female characters who are written in that age group, and to me, the older a person gets, generally the more interesting they become. To me, that’s how I’ve always written Wynonna Earp: she’s at the height of her career. And in my previous series, she was also blonde. And that may seem like a cosmetic thing, but as we get further down the road in the comic book series and possibly the TV series, everyone’s going to find out that’s not a cosmetic thing. That actually is a pretty deep storyline, why she went from brunette to blonde. That’s not a frivolous thing.”
Those who read the original miniseries would know — there is a precedent for a more volatile version fo Wynonna. The 1996 series begins with a framing device in which the character isn’t yet with the Black Badge division, but finds herself facing a seemingly-immortal supernatural threat…which she managed to hack apart with great enthusiasm.
“The series itself, of course I want anybody who’s going to watch the television show, that has never read comic books, to be able to pick up the comic and feel at home. At the same time, I want respect for all the readers who have read Wynonna Earp since 1996 to also feel like this is still my character, but it’s part new,” Smith said. “So the series that I’m doing is a hybrid, and that’s my own choosing. I wanted to do Wynonna at the age of 27 instead of 35 to 40, and this is before she became the composed character that she has been in my series before. This is when she was reckless, this is when she first became a part of the Black Badge Division, and how all of this came about. And by the stars all being aligned, that’s what Emily had planned for the wider-based audience of the TV series, so when I got her bible and the first few scripts for it, it was one of those magic moments where I said we were on the same page and the same track, and we hadn’t even spoken yet.”
You can get a copy of Wynonna Earp #1 at your local comic shop, or buy a digital copy here. The TV series debuts on Syfy on April 1.
