The state of Witch Doctor
February 20th, 2008Things are moving along. Lukas and I will be releasing Witch Doctor: First Incision, our 16-page ‘demo’, at the fifth annual Stumptown Comics Fest in Portland, Oregon on April 26 and 27. We’ll be holding an official release party the next week, on Thursday, May 1st. And a week or two after that, we’ll be posting the issue for free, right here, and throwing another release party — a virtual release party in a chatroom. More details on all that when we get a little closer to launch.
I’ve moved the workblog I’d planned for this space over to the blog section on Warren Ellis’ forum Whitechapel, and it’s turned into me talking about tangential pieces of the research I’ve been doing for Witch Doctor — stuff like the Red Queen Race, cannibalism in New Guinea, interesting and disturbing stuff I may or may not find a place for in the comic. The paragraphs below are a tidbit from the first Whitechapel workblog.
“It’s a sick world” is one of the major themes of Witch Doctor. Beyond that the phrase refers to the doctor in the title and to the state of the universe we’re creating, it also speaks to the way we’re approaching supernatural horror — welding the archetypal creatures of the genre to the sickest things in the animal kingdom.
Take the way bed bugs reproduce — it’s called “traumatic insemination.” Male bed bugs don’t bother getting the ladies drunk, they just impale them in the abdomen with their penises and pump semen into the wound. There’s only a few species of insects that do this. It’s good for the males, because it’s a way to get around mating resistance in females, but it’s obviously hard on the females who then have to heal and often get infections. So female have evolved ‘paragenitalia’ in the spots where they’re usually stabbed.
(The potential bandname of the day is “Hypodermic Genitalia.”)
Witch Doctor: Traumatically inseminating your brain.