If Buffy found religion: A Catholic order battles evil in Warrior Nun trailer

Alba Baptista stars as Ava in the Netflix adaptation of Ben Dunn's comic series Warrior Nun.

A young woman wakes up in a morgue and finds she now carries an embedded divine object in her back in Warrior Nun, a forthcoming fantasy drama from Netflix, based on the comic series by Ben Dunn. Not only has the divine brought her back from the dead, but she now has superpowers and a new mission to fight hell on Earth.

The first issue in the manga-style comic book series, "Warrior Nun Areala," debuted in 1994. The series features Sister Shannon Masters, a modern-day crusader for the Catholic Church's (fictional) Order of the Cruciform Sword. In the series mythology, the Order dates back to 1066, when a young Valkyrie woman named Auria converted to Christianity. Renamed Areala, she selects a new avatar every generation to carry on her mission of battling the agents of hell. Sister Shannon is the Chosen One. It's like Buffy the Vampire Slayer got religion.

Dunn has said he was inspired to create the series after learning, via a New York Times article, about the Fraternity of Our Lady, which established a chapter in Harlem in 1991 to run a soup kitchen. One of the nuns (the fraternity has both nuns and priests), Sister Marie Chantel, trained in the martial arts (judo and tae kwon do), and many of her fellow nuns also practiced self-defense, albeit mostly for sport. Dunn envisioned a world with nuns as superheroes, where heaven and hell are real dimensions. It's a fun series, because it's not Catholic proselytizing, despite the Christian themes and the nuns' sincere faith-unlike those infamous Jack Chick tracts and comic books. (I grew up reading the Crusader series, which honestly explains a lot about my rather warped psyche.)

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