Comic Encounters:Witch Doctor

Witch Doctor Vol. 1 No. 2, Brandon Seifert and Lukas Ketner: Dr. Vincent Morrow makes house calls. He wears a white coat, latex gloves, and has a doctor’s bag brimming with medical paraphernalia—including, apparently, a hypodermic needle the size of my forearm and a sword that glows red and cuts through anything.

If you’re wondering why a medical doctor brandishes a sword at his patients (in this issue, an eerily cherubic baby), then you clearly misunderstand Vincent’s job description. As a witch doctor, he cures ailments of the supernormal sort, well beyond the sniffles and tummy aches that are standard infant complaints. This baby needs to be stabbed. And when that doesn’t work, Dr. Morrow shakes the creepy little tyke—shakes it “like a polaroid picture—of an Etch-A-Skech—and some maracas!”

Only then does the “baby” reveal it’s true, nightmarish form: it’s a cuckoo faerie, a species that practices brood parasitism. The Mother Faerie replaces human babies with her young’uns, so unsuspecting families raise her mandible-faced alien children.

Witch Doctor is a medical procedural, and in the grand tradition of medical procedurals, Dr. Morrow uses his erudite knowledge, high tech tools, and a pinch of magic to eradicate nasty parasites. In this case, of course, the nasty parasites look like babies, with a pregnant woman to spawn them. When the humanoid, visibly pregnant Mother Cuckoo throws herself out of a hospital window to escape, Morrow laments his lost opportunity to kick her down the stairs.

The artist maintains that his final design of Mother Cuckoo was inspired by pictures of pregnant Barbie dolls. The resemblance is somewhat evident. I believe M. Cuckoo’s dead eyes, rosy cheeks, and shiny visage will be visiting me in my nightmares.

In lieu of a picture of the visceral Barbie horror, here’s Seifert’s description of the cuckoo faeries:

These are wildly alien creatures, creatures with an exoskeleton, that mimic humans the way some spiders mimic ants. They’ve got pretty much human-shaped bodies—only it’s an exoskeleton with segments visible at the joints. All the details, they just fill in with magic illusions and psychic mind-control.

When the offspring eventually reveals itself, it is a sickening, unholy combination of insect parts and plump baby extremities: ten fingers, ten toes, and a pair of dripping mandibles opened wide. Morrow and co. don’t need a pediatrician so much as they need an exterminator.

All together, it is a gory, luscious little episode. I like how Seifert and Ketner pull of a Lovecraftian marriage between scientific scholarship and unfathomable supernatural occurrences. (The story takes place in Arkham, Oregon. I’m guessing that’s their necessary pious nod to Lovecraft).

Ketner explains his approach to science and magic thusly:

It’s not replacing folklore with science as much as it is using the most interesting hooks from real life to rethink what something like a faerie could do and how they might have to go about it. They are, after all, from their own natural world. It might be a world that’s completely unlike our own science-based reality, but it’s always possible to find the right parallels.

Whatever it is, it works.

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