Brandon Seifert started his career in mainstream American comics in a pretty auspicious way: teaming with Lukas Ketner, an up-and-coming artist who has worked with Dark Horse, Image Comics and the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, the pair formed the creative core of Witch Doctor, the first new title launched by Robert Kirkman’s fledgling Skybound imprint (which currently also publishes Kirkman-penned hits like The Walking Dead, Thief of Thieves and Invincible, and will kick off Clone soon).The series was a massive success, both in terms of sales and critical acclaim, winning the pair an opportunity to continue Dr. Vincent Morrow’s adventures in supernatural medicine in next month’s Witch Doctor: Mal Practice.At the New York Comic Con earlier this month, Seifert joined us to discuss the series, his career and what’s next for Morrow’s mad medical misadventures.Alright–for the uninitiated, what’s your hundred-word pitch for this series?Witch Doctor is a horror medical drama. It’s sort of like if Dr. House fought supernatural diseases, like vampirism, demonic possession, zombism, stuff like that. A strange quirk of horror fiction is that a lot of the monsters in it are basically disease metaphors so putting a doctor up against them kind of makes a lot of sense.The book was the launch title for Robert Kirkman’s Skybound imprint and we’ve got a second miniseries coming out in November.Is this one of those things that’s in the vein of Hellboy, in terms of being an undending series of miniseries?Yeah–Hellboy was really inspirational. I don’t know if we’re going to continue in that kind of publishing format, but that was our original idea was that we’d do miniseries and one-shots and stuff. At this point, it makes more financial sense to turn it into an ongoing monthly book but there’s a lot of kinks that would have to get ironed out before that would be possible. The intention is there, and the ability is there to just keep telling stories with it kind of indefinitely. The central conceit of the series is, it’s taking classic horror monsters and combining them with the worst things from real-life biology and medicine. There’s just a hugely fertile–we can take any monster, and any monster can be the inspiration for a story…and any disease can be the inspiration for a story.
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