Long before her live-action series, Wynonna Earp had adventures throughout the Weird West in comics at Image and IDW Publishing.
Wynonna Earp has solidified its place as one of the most beloved and better received SyFy shows of the decade. With the fourth season of the series set to open up new terrain for the hero to traverse when new episodes return in 2021, we’re taking a closer look back at the comic book beginnings of the character and her story.
The show follows Wynonna as she deals finding her place in a town that doesn’t want her, a family curse and undead outlaws who want nothing more than her blood on their hands. It certainly takes its cues from Beau Smith and Joyce Chin’s original Wynonna Earp comics, but it has found its foothold in a slightly less fantastic version of the story. While revenants, demons, and centuries-old witches aren’t in short supply on the SyFy channel series, it has yet to adapt some of the weirder features of the original comics, including Zombie Mailmen and a mummy hitman working for the Egyptian mafia.
The books don’t rely so much on the small town and character-driven drama that the series has become known for. The first five issues of the comics, which were released in 1996 and 1997 by Image Comics, saw the hero travel from New Mexico all the way to New York City in an adventure that starts with designer drugs, ends with a supernatural mob epic, and involves a werewolf motorcycle gang along the way. This doesn’t mean that there aren’t any interpersonal problems to sort through, however.
After Smith and Dwayne Turner revived Wynonna Earp at IDW Productions in 2003, the second volume of the comic series took a turn that fans of the show will be familiar with, as it takes Wynonna all the way back to Tombstone, Arizona, the real-life location of the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral where Wyatt and Morgan Earp were deputized. The blend of supernatural and historical fiction not only makes the comics and show stand out in a way that is immediately noticeable and also offers a deep well of creative ink for the show to draw inspiration from.
If there is any one thing for TV series fans to take away from the Wynonna Earp books, it might be that nothing is off the table when it comes to delivering action, but that doesn’t mean that characters need to suffer in terms of their development just because there are monsters lurking or guns being fired. There is a genuine sense of agency in regards to the characters that comes through in the pages of Wynonna Earp. It might not be the most serious series, and it certainly doesn’t take itself as such, but scenarios that could very easily be played up for laughs or treated as throwaway gags always come with a sense of sincerity. It’s not unlike the feeling that you might get when scouring the pages of Invincible or Kick-Ass, two series that also walk the fine line between absurdly engrossing and just plain absurd.