Back in November I did an interview with Adam Watson for the comics news site Comics Bulletin. The interview got delayed a bit, but it’s up now and you can read it here! There’s a couple bits that are a little out of date (we changed plans for our next couple Witch Doctor stories after Adam and I spoke), but it’s a good place to go if you’re curious about how Witch Doctor came about, and about my background as a writer. (Plus, I talk about the music Dr. Morrow would listen to.)

Due to some sort of error on the posting end, one of the answers got left out, and another answer got substituted in its place. Here’s the original text; hopefully it’ll get straightened out soon.

AW: Can you tell us a little about what Witch Doctor is about?

BC: Witch Doctor is the story of Vincent Morrow, a doctor whose medical career ended in scandal and shame. He gets a chance to redeem himself when he’s headhunted into a new career as a sorcerer — and then he pulls a certain sword out of a certain stone, showing everyone that he’s apparently got this big important destiny. He follows that up by basically telling the world’s mystical community, “Screw you, you’re doing it wrong. I’m going to do this my way. And it’s going to be better.”

See, the world is a living organism, and monsters are its parasites. In the past the world’s mystical community have always thought about this like soldiers, fighting a war — but when you’re fighting a disease, you don’t think like a soldier, you need to think like a doctor. So Morrow’s gone off on his own to study supernature and figure out how it works, the better to kill it off. He’s not interested in doing the traditional things characters in his genre do, like hunting vampires. He’s interested in strapping vampires to a bed and trying to figure out either a cure that’ll revert them to normal humans, or a vaccine to keep humans from turning into vampires — which is what we saw in the first Witch Doctor story, First Incision.

Witch Doctor is set pretty early in Morrow’s mystical career, shortly after he settles down in Arkham, Oregon and picks up a two-person medical staff to help with his research. His assistants are Eric Gast, a good-natured, two-fisted EMT whose involvement with Morrow ended up costing him his job at a local hospital; and Penny Dreadful, who’s… not completely human. Penny’s both Morrow’s nurse of sorts, and his patient.

From a story angle, Witch Doctor is about taking the classic monsters of the horror genre and trying to breathe some new life into them by crossing them with the most disturbing things in medicine and zoology. I think reading about real animals is the best way to come up with interesting new monsters — sea cucumbers for instance, when they’re attacked they cough up some of their internal organs to distract and entangle predators. And male honey bees sever their own genitalia during mating, and leave them stuck in the queen. That’s good shit right there, when you’re a horror author.

(Also, Adam’s a fellow creator we know through the Portland comics community. Go check out his imprint Darkslinger Comics!)

Tags: articles on Witch Doctor, Comics Bulletin, interviews

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