"Witch Doctor is brilliant! A prescription for what's ailing comics today -- a dose of good storytelling." - Jimmie Robinson, creator of Bomb Queen
"The comic book I'm most looking forward to this year... Lukas Ketner's art is fantastic and Brandon Seifert's writing is fucking brilliant. I can't wait to see where they go with this book." - Mark Sweeney, colorist of Warren Ellis' Black Summer
The mayor of Portland, Oregon has declared April "Portland Comics Month" -- and adding to the four-color flood is the release of WITCH DOCTOR: FIRST INCISION, a new medical horror comic by PDX locals Brandon Seifert and Lukas Ketner.
It's a sick world -- literally. The universe is an organism, and the creatures of myth and legend are its parasites. Earth's antibodies -- humankind -- have been at war with supernature for all of history. But to fight a disease, you don't need soldiers -- you need doctors.
Enter Dr. Vincent Morrow. Excommunicated from the medical community and headhunted into an exciting new career in the black arts, he's here to diagnose earth's dark underbelly. Morrow serves the world with both hands -- one in magic, one in medicine -- as earth's protector. Earth's WITCH DOCTOR. It's a sick world -- he's here to treat it.
"As anyone who's read The Hot Zone knows, the real world is more horrifying than anything a writer could hope to imagine," says WITCH DOCTOR writer Brandon Seifert. Seifert points to the candiru, the blood-drinking spiny catfish of Amazon River that get stuck inside people's urethras. "I could never come up with something that sick -- but I can take it as my muse. WITCH DOCTOR grafts the monsters of real medicine and zoology to the archetypes of supernatural horror."
WITCH DOCTOR: FIRST INCISION is a 16-page horror/medical drama. "It's a crash-course introduction to Doctor Morrow, his staff and his world, presented as a rather warped take on vampires that's based on actual blood-drinking animals," says Seifert. WITCH DOCTOR is currently self-published, but Seifert is hoping FIRST INCISION -- which he describes as the WITCH DOCTOR "demo album'" -- will change that. "Lukas and I, we're a 'band,' and we'd like to get 'signed' to a 'record label.' We have lots more WITCH DOCTOR stories to tell. We just need a publisher's help, so we can actually afford to."
