With a healthy mix of Doctor Who and Lovecraft, Witch Doctor won over horror fans almost instantly when it made its debut in 2011. The latest miniseries recently wrapped up and I spoke with Brandon Seifert at Comic-Con to learn about the chances of an ongoing series, fan feedback, and his interest in a Witch Doctor TV series:
Were you and Skybound happy with the sales and reaction to Mal Practice. Are they interested in new issues?
Brandon Seifert: Yeah, Skybound is certainly happy with it. They’ve been asking me about when I’m going to write the next one. Right at this second, I’m doing a bunch of other work. I love Witch Doctor, but I’m not quite sure when I’ll have enough cleared off my plate that I can start working on it again.
With Witch Doctor being the first professional comic book project you worked on, is taking your time more about quality over quantity?
Brandon Seifert: There’s also quantity over quality of life. The more projects I take on, the more miserable I get. My first issue of a professionally published comic came out two years ago, as of June. I’m still very new to this and very new at juggling projects. It turns out that very quickly, I get to a point where it’s diminishing returns. So part of it is the quality of work and I’d rather not have my dream job make me miserable.
You previously told me about your interest to make Witch Doctor a monthly ongoing series. Is that still something you’d like to move forward with?
Brandon Seifert: I’d love to do an ongoing series and we’ve talked about an ongoing series, but Lukas is never going to be able to draw it that fast. He averages eight weeks an issue, and in the last few issues he had to take on took on other work and it ended up being eleven to fourteen weeks an issue.
It would be completely impossible for us to do a monthly ongoing series unless we brought in an extra artist. It’s something we talked to Skybound about, but it’s a lot of work and a lot of approvals. It’s something we may revisit at some point and I’d love to do it as an ongoing series. It’s much easier to get retailers and readers to buy comics if they know that they’ll come out every month indefinitely.
Have you been keeping up with fan response to Witch Doctor: Mal Practice or do you try to stay away from all of that?
Brandon Seifert: I thought I had an idea in my head of what it was going to be like and people turned out to be far more intense about it. It turned out to be far weirder and neater than I would have expected. I do have a lot of contact with fans online. There is a Witch Doctor fan forum that I’m one of the moderator on and I get a lot of feedback on Facebook on Twitter. Because we’re both based in Portland, Its’ been really easy to cultivate a large fan community in Portland.
Has fan feedback resulted in any major changes to Witch Doctor, whether it be characters or the story?
Brandon Seifert: After the first issue, people had a pretty lukewarm reaction to Eric Ghast and for good reason. He was just sort of there and didn’t really do much. He was mostly there for Morrow to deliver exposition to. Especially after the third issue of the first miniseries, Eric becomes more active and starts making his own sarcastic comments at Morrow’s expense. If I’m going to change what I’m doing based on fan response, it’s going to be something like that.
Last year, we spoke about your interest in seeing Witch Doctor as a TV series. Have there been any developments?
Brandon Seifert: That was always one of the appeals of Witch Doctor for Skybound. It has a really episodic hook to it, so it could easily be a TV show if you had the right budget. It’s something they’ve been pursuing, but we don’t have any announcements yet. I think it would be a really cool TV show, but since I don’t have any knowledge of the TV and film world, I don’t think about it too much. There has certainly been a lot of interest.
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To learn more about Witch Doctor, visit: http://www.witchdoctorcomic.com/
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