By Andrew A. Smith
Tribune Content Agency
Did comic books invent the “weird” Western? Wikipedia seems to think so, and the idea is buttressed by Wynonna Earp, debuting April 1 on Syfy channel – a modern supernatural Western based on a long-running comics concept.
Wynonna first appeared in a five-issue eponymous series at Image Comics in 1996. Created and written by Beau Smith (Guy Gardner: Warrior), Wynonna Earp (first series) #1 introduced us to a descendant of legendary lawman Wyatt Earp, a shoot-first-ask-questions-never U.S. Marshal of the covert “Monster Squad” (later the Black Badge Division).
“They’ve been around since Teddy Roosevelt’s time,” Smith told Westfield.com about the Black Badges. And since the early 1900s, he said, they’ve been chasing down anything supernatural that breaks the law, from vampire bank robbers to zombie tax cheats.
In Wynonna’s first miniseries, the marshal – accompanied by two bounty-hunting werewolf bikers -- battled redneck vampires in New Mexico and a mummy enforcer in New York. Wynonna’s philosophy was established there: “Track ‘em, whack ‘em and sack ‘em.”
Wynonna next appeared at IDW Publishing in two more miniseries. In Wynonna Earp: Home on the Strange (2003),we learned the Clanton gang had discovered they could cheat death by killing all the Earps – leading to another Earp-Clanton showdown at the OK Corral, 122 years after the first. In Wynonna Earp: The Yeti Wars (2011), Earp traveled to Alaska during a battle between Yeti and Bigfoot, complicated by other bump-in-the-night types like the Vampire Nation and the Immortal Consortium. All are collected in the trade paperback Wynonna Earp: Strange Inheritance.
Which brings us to the TV show, starring Melanie Scrofano (Supernatural, Haven). The show makes a few changes to help Wynonna work in a different medium, but she remains a hard-drinking, trash-talking, modern-day Western gunslinger. Shamier Anderson (Constantine, Defiance) plays Earp’s boss, Agent Xavier Dolls, who disapproves of Earp’s shoot-from-the-hip style, but has a few secrets of his own. Other notables include Tim Rozon (Lost Girl, Being Human) as a very long-lived Doc Holliday, whose allegiances and long history are shady; and Dominique Provost-Chalkley (Avengers: Age of Ultron) as Earp’s sister, Waverly. Bobo Del Ray, a demon gangster who debuted in the very first issue of Wynonna Earp in 1996, is the big bad of the show. He’s played by Michael Eklund (Arrow, Bates Motel).
In the earlier comics, Earp was a veteran, 35-year-old, blonde law enforcer acting more or less solo. On TV, she’s 27 and brunette, and is just starting out. On the show, Wynonna has returned to her home town of Purgatory (actually Calgary, Alberta), which Bridget Liszewski of thetvjunkies.com describes as “a place that traps people and demons alike.” Agent Dolls appears with a proposal to help her continue her ancestor’s legacy by cleaning the bad elements out of town – which aren’t just criminals, but demons called revenants. They can’t be killed by ordinary methods, but fortunately Wyatt’s big ol’ Peacemaker is still around, and it can do the job.
Meanwhile, this being TV, there’s got to be some interpersonal drama. Earp has a typically complicated relationship with her headstrong sister. And the townsfolk, according to Liszewski, “remember her as a crazy chick with a drinking problem and other behavioral issues.”
These changes are mostly the work of Emily Andras, who is not only the showrunner and a producer, but wrote the first two episodes. They are evidently OK with Smith, who described in a five-page essay in the first issue of a new “Wynnona Earp” series his recent on-set visit as “the best 48 hours of my life.” He praised Andras as“smart and quick-witted” and “generous and creative.”
So what about that new comic book series? Launched in February from IDW, the new Wynonna Earp is written by Smith, of course, and drawn by newcomer Lora Innes (The Dreamer). Two issues have been released, and it appears to be a mixture of the old series and the TV show.
Unlike the previous comic book series, this one focuses on a rookie Wynonna (like the TV show), who is brunette (like the TV show), and looks like actress Melanie Scrofano (like the TV show). But unlike the TV show, the series opens with Earp already a member of the U.S. Marshals Black Badge Division, with Agent Dolls already her (disapproving) supervisor.
And our lawgal is going after Mars Del Ray, brother of Bobo, who is head of the Chupacabra Cartel, which provides high-end, black-market brains and body parts to those who need them – like high-functioning zombies, say, or wizards who need a heart of liver to cast a spell.
And if you’re a rich vampire, you don’t want just any old blood, like from a homeless wino or something. You’d want the hemoglobin provided from Chupacabra, derived from the one percent, who have eaten and drunk well all their lives and are guaranteed disease-free. You only go around once or twice in undeath. Why settle?
That sort of black humor infuses the action and horror of Wynonna Earp, giving the series a genre-blender vibe. That feel is buttressed by Innes’ art, which softens the standard action-hero dynamics and would-be horror with an emphasis on expressions and a somewhat cartoony feel.
That genre-mixing is appropriate, given the success the supernatural Western has had in comics.
But, Wikipedia aside, comics can’t claim to be first to feature the “weird Western,” especially if you consider the category to include Westerns mixed with genres other than horror, like science fiction or fantasy. The pulps, for example – the lurid, cheap fiction magazines published (roughly) from the 1890s to the 1950s – featured cowboys who found themselves in distinctly non-Western situations now and then.
And various television series have featured weird Westerns, as well. Several Twilight Zone episodes in the early 1960s mixed Western themes with fantasy or SF, as did one episode of Star Trek (“Spectre of the Gun,” 1968). Kung Fu (1972-75) mixed the Western with the martial-arts craze of the 1970s.
But where the weird Western got the most traction – and its actual name – was in comics.
Some were only sort-of Westerns, like DC’s Super Chief, launched in 1961, an Iroquois who gained super-powers from a meteor in the 15th century. That’s 400 years before the Wild West, but it was still a frontier book of a sort.
As was “Tomahawk,” which featured a Revolutionary War hero in buckskin that premiered in 1947. The character started out as a straight, historically plausible figure, but – as noted in Don Markstein’s toonopedia.com – “all through the late 1950s and early to mid-'60s, Tomahawk fought gigantic tree men, miraculously-surviving dinosaurs, mutated salamanders, and other menaces that seem somehow to have escaped the history books.”
But for the real deal, the world had to wait until the second series at DC Comics to bear the title “All Star Western,” which launched in 1970. The second issue of that book introduced El Diablo, a comatose man who was inhabited (and animated) by a Native American spirit – or perhaps a devil. The tenth issue gave us Jonah Hex, who couldn’t talk to ghosts like in the movie, but whose mangled face, bizarre background and ultra-violence mixed the Western with the modern anti-hero. By the twelfth issue, DC stopped fighting the inevitable and simply changed the name of the book to “Weird Western Tales” – not only being more truthful in describing the book’s contents, but giving the newest American genre its name.
After that, many a strange character rode the trails of the old West in comics, in anthologies, or as guest stars, or as the stars of books with names like Billy the Kid’s Old-Time Oddities, Cowboys and Aliens and Tex Arcana.
So no one should be surprised by Wynonna Earp’s ability to mix genres and cross media. She’s in plenty of good company!
Reach Captain Comics by email (capncomics@aol.com), the Internet (comicsroundtable.com), Facebook (Captain Comics Round Table) or Twitter (@CaptainComics).
Replies
I don't have much to say, Cap, except I find this topic interesting. In movies there's Billy the Kid vs Dracula and Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter, neither of which I've seen. In the 50s the ME Ghost Rider fought weird menaces, but I believe they always had non-fantastic explanations in the end.
The cover of All Star Western #59, 1951, is an odd case. It doesn't appear from the summaries at DC Indexes or here that the story involved magic or a giant bird. This was the second issue of the title. What can have happened there? The story was supposed to involve a giant bird - a freak, or member of a now-extinct species - and when it came in it didn't have one? Strong Bow was originally envisioned as a magician, but the idea was dropped?