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Former Portland State student Branden Seifert has found comic book success with his Witch Doctor series.
Comics craft Brandon Seifert talks writing comics, moving from AK to PDX and being true to Doctor Who Tristan Cooper Vanguard Staff
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ortland is rife with comics writers and artists. Close your eyes and stick out your hand at Holocene and you’ll probably accidentally hit one of them, or at least someone who knows someone. They come in all varieties, from established cartoonists like Craig Thompson to crime-writing veterans like Greg Rucka. More creators are moving to Portland every year to be a part of the city’s burgeoning comics community. Brandon Seifert is an up-and-coming Portland comics writer and former Portland State student who found success writing for big-name books based on the Doctor Who and Hellraiser franchises. He’s most known for Witch Doctor, a kind of magical medical procedural (think the TV show House mixed with Marvel Comics sorcerer Dr. Strange) that he created with artist Lukas Ketner. The second volume of Witch Doctor, Mal Practice, has just finished its initial single-issue run and will be available in collected paperback format this summer. The Vanguard sat down with Seifert to talk comics, fact-checking, the rise of digital and his time at PSU. This interview has been edited for concision and clarity. Vanguard: Tell me how you got started in comics— your origin story. Brandon Seifert: I’ve always liked comics, and I’ve always wanted to write comics, but I’m by nature kind
6 Geek Guide | Vanguard 2013
of lazy and scared. So it took me a lot of wanting to write and not actually writing. And then in 2007 I met Lukas Ketner, who is my artist on Witch Doctor. He was working as a freelance illustrator at the time, and he also wanted to do comics, so we decided we were going to team up and do basically a portfolio piece. It was going to be 16 pages, it was going to be really short, and it was just exclusively so we’d each have something in our portfolio that we [could] take and try to get other work through. What ended up happening was that the idea that we came up with was Witch Doctor. Really quickly it was obvious to us that it would be stupid to just do 16 pages with it, because it was a viable concept in itself— we could actually get a publisher for it. So we did the issue, we shopped it around, we got a lot of interest from Dark Horse and IDW and some other publishers, and then [Robert Kirkman of Image Comics] made us the offer that we went with. VG: What was the tipping point? What was the thing that got you to Image? BS: The thing was, Lukas was a freelance professional illustrator. When you’re starting out in comics, frequently there is no money up front. They don’t actually pay you; you just get the lion’s share of the profits if the series ends up being profitable. [Lukas] was not going to be able to produce the book on what’s called “the back end,” exclusively for royalties, so we had to go with someone who would actually pay him a page rate. We’d gotten two offers from the larger indie comics publishers, both of which would have been backend deals, so we couldn’t take either of those. Kirkman was the one that was like, “All right, I’ll pay him money up front, I’ll pay him in advance,” and so that was the offer we couldn’t refuse. VG: You were a fact-checker for the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe. How [did] you get that job, and what was that like? BS: There’s a website called the Marvel Unofficial Appendix, something like that. It’s sort of like the Official Handbook but for really obscure characters, and it’s really, really in-depth, like summarizing every appearance that they had. I submitted some profiles for it, but it was so time-
consuming that I really didn’t do too much of it. But then I ended up setting up a Yahoo group for the people who were doing it. When Marvel decided they were going to do the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe again, they just went to this website and hired all the guys from it, because they were already doing the job for free and were clearly detail-oriented. The guy who was the head of the website became the editor on that project, so I got to proofread a bunch of different Marvel handbooks. Which meant I knew the endings of some Marvel events six or eight months before they happened—like I knew that Captain America was going to die the summer before it happened. I couldn’t talk to anybody about it. VG: So you were looking at stuff going forward, you weren’t researching what’s in Journey into Mystery #182? BS: No. I’ve always been a Marvel fan, and I have my specific corners of the Marvel universe, which I really like and I kind of exhaustively know about. Things like Power Pack and New Warriors and Cloak and Dagger. Anything pertaining to those, off the top of my head I can generally be like, “Oh, it’s not quite what it said in this random issue.” It wasn’t fact-checking in the traditional journalistic sense, where I’m double-checking all of the things that it says. Part of it was proofreading and part of it was from my own knowledge of the subjects being covered, making sure it all seemed accurate. VG: So you have your own original creation, Witch Doctor, for which your word is law, Lukas Ketner’s word is law. But then you have stuff like Hellraiser and Doctor Who, where you deal with these established characters with a lot of fans. Has your experience as a fact-checker affected how you attack franchise work? BS: I came from a journalism background to begin with. I did freelance journalism, arts and culture journalism, for a couple years, which is what ended up introducing me to Lukas and getting us working on comics together. That was something I ended up applying a bunch of different places. I applied that with the fact-checking of the Marvel handbooks and…Doctor Who and Hellraiser. My strength coming from a journalism background is that I know how to research shit. I know how to read things. That is something I used with Hellraiser. I go back a lot and read the book and watch the movies and try to make sure I’m getting things accurate. But it’s also something I use in Witch Doctor, because Witch Doctor has a lot of medicine biology, and I try and get it right. Basically, if there’s anything that’s not accurate to how it works in the real world, that’s just choice on my part rather than me screwing up. There’s a really large folklore and mythology com-