Review by Ian Keogh

Season Zero is squarely aimed at viewers of the Wyonna Earp TV show who want to catch up with her past, except it’s more a case of her past catching up with her present. It’s been documented Wynonna originally found her home town of Purgatory troubling, and when young she thought the answer was to run with a biker gang. Disagreements have now ensued, and all these years later her best friend from those days has died.

Beau Smith writes with Tim Rozon from the TV show, and the result is a very wordy script, with every character of a sizeable cast having their say in every scene. As ever, Smith’s not good at bantering dialogue, and the cast so often come across as spouting lines rather than expressing feelings, jokes or opinions. The large cast is also a limitation when the action comes, as comics isn’t ideally suited to showing simultaneous action in different places. Smith and Rozon opt for the better solution of finishing one fight before switching to another

With the location of the last stand being named the Bloody Porch, Smith and Rozon reference The Wild Bunch, and echo it in the plot of ageing outlaws who believe someone can offer them one big score. There’s no shortage of mayhem to that, and Angel Hernandez may not be quite the technical artist that Chis Evenhuis is on other Wynonna Earp, but he’s a better fit for the the series. His scratchier ink line and acknowledgment of wind and smoke give a greater realism to combat and to the personalities involved. Jay Fotos keeps the colours muted and largely Earth-toned to seal the effect.

Season Zero features the surprise of one enemy being dealt with in four chapters, and without the fifth they’d result in the best Wynonna Earp in comics form to date. The fifth, though, drops the ranking by introducing yet another indomitable woman holding all the cards, a seeming rule being to expand the cast by one woman with every outing. It prompts a fight giving the impression the participants are reading lines from dummy cards held up behind others. What’s meant to impress as smart dialogue falls flat for being overplayed, and while there are hints of a bigger picture, it’s never explored.

Wynonna and cast are next seen in Bad Day at Black Rock, where there’s little reference to anything that happens here, or both stories are available in All In.