On Comic Books & other Infectious Diseases
April 25th, 2008To go along with the online release of First Incision, here’s the text piece I did for the back of the print version.
I swear to God, all we wanted was a portfolio piece. Not a brain infection.
A portfolio piece is all Witch Doctor: First Incision was supposed to be for me and Lukas. Lukas is a professional artist and I’m a professional writer, but neither of us have done this before, this comics-thing. I’m a journalist and he’s an illustrator, and though we loves us some comics and both have wanted to make them for years, neither of us ever had. We needed something to show publishers that we can tell stories. So we decided to combine our powers and make a comic. Something short.
First Incision is pretty short. But Witch Doctor as a whole is anything but. The concept we came up with isn’t something that would rest in peace if we tried to slip it in our portfolios and go get jobs on Spider-Man. It’s infected us. For us it’s become a brain disease (“An encephalopathy,” Dr. Morrow’s voice points out in my head). And we’re hoping it’s a transmissible encephalopathy. You’ve read it now. If we’ve done our jobs right, maybe it’s infected you too.
First Incision is our demo. This is us laying out our stall, showing readers (and, um, potential publishers) what we’ve got to offer. We’ve got lots more Witch Doctor stories to tell. Like The Laughing Dead, a miniseries that does the same thing to zombies that we did to vampires in First Incision — crosses them with something disturbing from the real world, and hopefully uses that reality to make them a little more disturbing, fresh and believable. After that we’ve got the entire bodies of folklore and medicine to cut apart and sew together in novel ways.
The thing that surprised me the most when I started research for this project was how much more interesting I found the medical books than the mythology and horror stories I read. And how much more disturbing the medical stuff was too. I kept getting the urge to say things like “You could fill this half-gallon milk carton with all the bacteria in the average human body.” And “Did you know the skin of a tapeworm is basically like our intestines, only inside out?” It really is a sick world.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the unholy trinity of modern horror — vampires, werewolves and zombies — are all parasites, infectious agents that take over a host. I think it’s their communicability that makes them so frightening. Yeah, a haunted house might be scary — but it’s basically just a monster under house arrest. Eddie Izzard’s advice about avoiding people under house arrest — “Just don’t go in that fucking house!” — works just as well for ghosts.
And the “disease = demons” parallel goes farther that might be immediately obvious. H.P. Lovecraft was a man who could scare you with his philosophy. In his world, humanity exists in a universe full of things that were so very old when we first rose and will be here so very long after we’re all dead. Things that might kill us all, but wouldn’t care, or even notice. And that’s our world too. That’s just as apt a description for Ebola Zaire and Mad Cow as it is for Cthulhu and Nyarlathotep.
Diseases are our monsters these days. And doctors are our protectors and our shaman and our wisemen. It’s a sick world, and there’s a lot of work for a Witch Doctor to do.
We hope you enjoyed our brain infection.
- Brandon Seifert
Portland, Oregon