Witch Doctor is the kind of comics we need more of: Witty, self-aware, intelligent stories that acknowledge where comics have been while confidently striding into the future.

Each page is a treasure, with lush, evocative art punctuated by razor sharp dialogue by iconic, yet unique characters. This intoxicating chemistry spins together in a dizzying blend that jolts and revives a genre that many would dismiss as being strip-mined of any potential.

If you’re not reading Witch Doctor, I have no recourse but to seriously question your taste in comics.

Damn. Thanks Rantz!

In other Witch Doctor news… there is no Witch Doctor news. Yet. I’m working on the script for Witch Doctor: Second Incision (which should come out this fall, and is tentatively titled “Haunted Housecall”), and Lukas has been doing some re-designs of our cast based on feedback we got on First Incision and our own revised thoughts on what we’re making. Hopefully we’ll have some real news soon! Thanks everybody who’s read our book and cheered us on!

I’m actually here already. Olympia’s one of the place that’s near and dear to my heart (because it’s very, very strange), and Lukas will be joining me tomorrow. We’ve only got 20 copies of the first printing of First Incision left, so come get one early! The Cartoonists’ Expo (the standard “comics convention room-full-of-tables”) will be held at The Vault from noon to 5 pm, and admission is free!

We’ll be sharing a table with Tony Morgan of Gunbaby Graphics, creator of the awesome, dark graphic novel Chicken Leg Bone Boy. Tony was one of my favorite artists in my hometown (Fairbanks, Alaska), and I had no idea he lived in Portland until I ran into him at the Stumptown Comics Fest in April. It’s a small coast! If you like Witch Doctor, you should definitely check out Chicken Leg Bone Boy too.

- Brandon
Eating pizza in the Spar, Olympia

And if you’re in Seattle during the Emerald City Comic Con this weekend, you can get a copy too — just not at the Con. Lukas and I didn’t manage to score a table — so I’ll be selling it on a nearby street corner instead.

I will personally be standing on the corner of Pike and 8th Ave (on the far side of Pike from the Convention Center) to give you your Comic Fix at the following times:

Saturday: 4 and 5 pm; possibly 1 pm if I’ve made it to town by then
Sunday: Noon, 4 pm

It’s a conjoined release party for Witch Doctor and new local publications Diamond Comics and Capture Release, and will also feature a reading and slide show presentation by France’s Christophe Blain (Isaac the Pirate) and T. Edward Bak (Service Industry).

You should especially swing by if you missed us at Stumptown Comics Fest, or if you picked up the book at Stumptown and liked what you read.

Here’s a couple photos from Stumptown, taken by Paperback Reader’s wonderfully nice Derek M. Koch, who stayed up late the first night of the con to write a positively gushing review of our first issue. For me, that was one of those moments that made the whole con worthwhile — and we had lots of those!

And then there’s the fan art.

FAN ART?

Yes, fan art! From Jimmie Robinson, creator of the excellent Shadowline/Image series Bomb Queen. Jimmie sent us a GORGEOUS sketch of Penny he did tonight!

I’ve gotta say, I’m floored. But you know what else is amazing? The coloring job Mark Sweeney, colorist of Warren Ellis’ Black Summer and the forthcoming Image anthology Comic Book Tattoo, did of the black and white version of First Incision’s cover! (But the most amazing thing of all is that Mark sent me this a couple weeks ago, and I’m only now getting around to posting it! I’m so sorry Mark! You should’ve seen the look on Lukas’ face today when I mentioned that I still hadn’t shared it. I meant to post it last week as a T-minus-one-week teaser, and lost track of time!)

 

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 have us 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 Night of 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
The day before this got printed

To read Witch Doctor: First Incision, click here.

And that, folks, is our comic. We hope you’ve enjoyed it (and if you did, please let us know)!

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