AICN COMICS: Q&@ is our new semi-weekly interview column where some of your favorite @$$Holes interview comic bookdom’s biggest, brightest, newest, and oldest stars. Enjoy this latest in-depth interview filled with @$$y goodness and be sure to join the rest of your favorite @$$Holes for their opinions on the weekly pull every Wednesday with AICN COMICS REVIEWS!
@’s by WITCH DOCTOR’s
Brandon Seifert!
Matt Adler here. You may have heard about Robert Kirkman’s new Skybound imprint from Image Comics, which aims to usher in the next generation of creator-owned comics. Leading off the imprint is Brandon Seifert and Lukas Ketner’s WITCH DOCTOR, a supernatural medical thriller focusing on a doctor and his team of assistants who are out to cleanse the world of supernatural horror. I caught up with Brandon to talk about his series, and get to the heart of what makes it tick.MATT ADLER: What was the genesis of the idea for WITCH DOCTOR?
BRANDON SEIFERT (BRANDON): I had the idea that turned into WITCH DOCTOR a long time ago, 2002 or 2003 or so. I was thinking about characters like Dr. Abraham Van Helsing and Doctor Strange, and thought it’d be fun to see a doctor who investigated the supernatural using his medical background, rather than one who was a generic monster hunter or wizard. I also thought it’d be fun to have a character like that who had a biting sense of black humor. That idea sat in a notebook until 2007, when Lukas and I started talking about doing a comic together. It was at that point that I realized that all the monsters should have strong parallels with real-world diseases, which was the final ingredient I’d been missing.
MATT: What's your collaboration with Lukas Ketner like? Has he helped to shape the stories?BRANDON: I tend to come to Lukas fairly late in the idea process. I usually show up and I’m like, “okay, so in this story we’ve got this kind of monster, and Morrow does this, and then he says this joke, and then there’s a page-turn...”
Even when Lukas isn’t personally influencing what happens in a story, working with him means that I specifically tailor the stories to showcase things I think he’ll enjoy drawing. I always spend a lot of time thinking about monsters and gadgets I think Lukas would draw the crap out of — and he usually does!
MATT: What are some of your influences? Do I detect a Doctor Strange fan in you?
BRANDON: I'm actually not a Doctor Strange fan, now that you mention it. The cloak and the billowy shirt and the alliteration and the manservant — none of that speaks to me. I AM a fan of his... let’s call it a “character class”? He’s the Occult Doctor, the doctor who investigates monsters and the supernatural, and that’s an old idea in horror fiction.As far as influences go, the biggest ones on WITCH DOCTOR are HELLBOY, “House M.D.”, “Doctor Who”, Joss Whedon shows (especially “Buffy”), Tom Waits songs, and Warren Ellis comics (especially PLANETARY), as well as stuff like “Ghostbusters”.
MATT: The tagline to the series is "It's a sick world." Just how sick is it? Is it overrun by supernatural threats to an apocalyptic level, or does life go on for most people as normal?
BRANDON: WITCH DOCTOR is definitely set in a “world outside your window.” On the surface, the world is exactly like the one we’re in — with maybe some stranger, scarier parts. There’s more paranoia about disease, a lot more people walking around in surgical masks because they’re afraid of catching something.
But the general public has no idea monsters are preying on them, or that there’s a supernatural Extinction Event headed their way.
MATT: What can you tell us about Vincent Morrow and his supporting cast? Is Morrow himself unbalanced?BRANDON: I wouldn’t call Morrow “unbalanced.” “Broken,” sure, but “unbalanced” sounds like he’s crazy. He’s screwed up, but he’s not crazy.
Morrow’s a bit of a Byronic hero — on the one hand brilliant, creative and resourceful, and on the other hand arrogant, cynical and morally shaky. You want him as your doctor because he will figure out how to treat your disease — but he’ll treat you like crap the whole time.
Morrow’s got two assistants. Eric Gast is a paramedic; he’s the Watson to Morrow’s Sherlock, and he’s sort of a refugee from a medical drama. Penny Dreadful is kind of the opposite, a refugee from a horror story. She’s infected with some kind of monster (or maybe she is a monster — we aren’t giving that away yet!), and she and Morrow have an agreement, an “I’ll scratch your back” sort of deal.
MATT: How much research did you have to do for this series? Is the amount of detail something that's key to making this series work?
BRANDON: Honestly, the amount of detail and the, well, “truthiness” in the stories is the thing I think sets WITCH DOCTOR the most apart from other horror comics, and from other horror fiction in general, really. We’ve seen real world science and biology in horror before — part of the big draw of “Alien” is that the monsters in it have a life cycle based on something terrifying from the real world — but it’s mostly on the SF-Horror end. We haven’t seen a lot of supernatural horror that’s rooted in real science. And it’s a great place to find scary stuff!As far as research goes, I’ve spent the last three-plus years reading about diseases, parasites, epidemiology, feeding habits of animals, stuff like that. I’ve also done a lot of reading about folklore. The monsters people actually believed in are pretty interesting, and lots of them aren’t what you’d expect — vampires were usually red-faced and swollen with blood, and sunlight didn’t hurt them. I think that stuff, the background lore from most of the early horror stories, is a really good place to find monsters that seem fresh.
MATT: How did WITCH DOCTOR end up with Robert Kirkman's Skybound imprint? Have they played a significant role in shaping the final product?
BRANDON: A couple years ago we got an email from Robert, out of the blue. Turns out he’d seen some of Lukas’ art online, and then found the initial WITCH DOCTOR story we’d put up on our website for free — and loved it!Robert and company have been pretty hands-off as far as the final product goes. Robert has always been adamant that he wanted to pick us up because he liked what we were doing — not because he wanted to change it. He’s available if we need advice on stuff, but he doesn’t force it on us — if I want his input on story structure or whatever, I know I’m welcome to give him a call and he’ll help me out.
MATT: Do you have plans for WITCH DOCTOR beyond this initial miniseries?
BRANDON: Oh man, do we ever! I’ve got a list of something like 50 story ideas at this point, some short, some long. Me and Lukas are hoping we can do WITCH DOCTOR in sort of the HELLBOY mode, as a series of miniseries, one-shots and short stories. But of course, that depends on people actually buying the book!
MATT: Is WITCH DOCTOR your sole focus at the moment?
BRANDON: Yep. That, and my day job. I have a few other comics ideas in various stages of development, including a couple with artists attached. But I pretty much had to put them on hold until we got the first WITCH DOCTOR miniseries off the ground. WITCH DOCTOR is me and Lukas’ baby, and we wanted to make sure we got it right — especially now that we’ve got so many eyes on us since we got picked up by Skybound!MATT: Thanks, Brandon. Look for WITCH DOCTOR #1 soon from Skybound! And WITCH DOCTOR #0 is going to be available for free through ComiXology starting Wednesday — so that's free on iPhone, iPad, Android and on the ComiXology website!
Matt Adler is a writer/journalist, currently writing for AICN among other outlets. He’s been reading comics for 20 years, writing about them for 7, and spends way, way, too much time thinking about them, which means he really has no choice but to figure out how to make a living out of them. He welcomes all feedback.
Proofs, co-edits & common sense provided by Sleazy G
