B.P.R.D.: The Dead Remembered Explores Hellboy's Fiery Friend, Liz Sherman

Tuesday, 30 November 2010 21:37

B.P.R.D.: The Dead Remembered Explores Hellboy's Fiery Friend, Liz Sherman

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B.P.R.D.: The Dead Remembered explores the paranormal origins of Hellboy's sidekick Liz Sherman.

Upcoming comic book miniseries B.P.R.D.: The Dead Remembered digs into the traumatic teen years of Hellboy’s pyrokinetic pal, Liz

Sherman.

Written by Hellboy creator Mike Mignola and Dark Horse Comics writer and editor Scott Allie, the three-issue story arc lands April 6, 2011. But will it ignite, given that Liz is no superhero?

“We need more female superheroes, but I don’t think of Liz as one,” Allie told Wired.com in an e-mail interview. “This is a horror story, with Liz at a very early stage in her career, trying to control her powers.”

With Karl Moline on pencils, Andy Owens on inks and Dave Stewart on colors, B.P.R.D.: The Dead Remembered winds back the clock on the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense’s female fire-starter to three years after the 14-year-old Liz accidentally burned her family alive.

Judging by our first look at Moline and Jo Chen’s covers (above and below), Hellboy appears to help Liz, the young B.P.R.D. ward, sort out more than a few internal and external demons and ghosts. The miniseries also works out Liz’s fragmentary timeline as she goes from B.P.R.D. prisoner to active agent, and explores her spirituality — something Mignola’s Hellboy and B.P.R.D. comics always scrutinize.

“We wanted to look at the earliest point in her evolution, and how religion played into it,” Allie said.

Hellboy sidekick and haunted flame-thrower Liz Sherman steps into the spotlight in B.P.R.D.: The Dead Remembered.

Mignola and Allie also want to further knit together fans of Hellboy and Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer comics, which Allie also co-writes and edits for Dark Horse.

“I was surprised to find out how many Buffy fans were already Hellboy fans, way before Guillermo Del Toro’s Hellboy movies,” said Allie, whose latest Buffy issue with Whedon arrives Wednesday (see cover below). “There’s definitely a crossover. Liz is more powerful than Buffy, but her powers aren’t under control, or of any real use, in B.P.R.D.: The Dead Remembered.

“With Buffy, Joss has taken traditional female traits and portrayed them as heroic, whereas they’ve been traditionally treated as weaknesses in genre fiction,” Allie added. “What Mike did is just as radical: He ignored the traditional female traits, and just wrote [Liz] as a heroic, flawed character, undefined by gender. My story’s different, because she’s more of a girl.”

Whatever Liz is in The Dead Remembered, she’ll hew closer to continuity than Del Toro’s astounding film adaptations, which predictably painted the female B.P.R.D. agent as a Hellboy love interest. Not that Del Toro should ever stop making Hellboy movies.

“Those things sell comics like you wouldn’t believe,” Allie said. “But Guillermo developed those characters to be his own, so it’s hard to even make comparisons anymore. But man, I’ve had three of the people working on my Liz miniseries telling me her hair was supposed to be blue-black, like the films’ Selma Blair, instead of red, like my Elizabeth Sherman.”