Seifert's Worklog

BrandonSeifert

Dammit. I've tried to write this post twice; both times I used the "Zoom In" command in Safari and my browser crashed. Let's not do that again!

So.  The work.  (Since I'm too lazy to type a preamble about the history of Witch Doctor for a third time.)

BrandonSeifert

We're in the thick of working on the first Witch Doctor miniseries right now.  I'm wearing several hats on it (writer and letterer primarily, but since I'm a control freak and it's my first project I'm trying to do everything I can to help with publicity, which so far mostly involves nagging), and it's turned out to be quite a struggle to juggle the project and my day job.  I've cut my hours and I'm switching my workdays around, trying to find a set-up that's easier on me, because February, March and the first half of April flat-out killed me.  Killed me dead.

As for what's going on:

I turned in a script last week, and I'm presently waiting on notes.

Last weekend was Stumptown Comics Fest here in Portland, which was fun but exhausting, and topped off a month and a half where half my weekends were spent at Cons.  At this point I'm very glad I've got three full months off before the next Con (SDCC!).

Today I finished up two of the final three pages of lettering for #1; I'd put off doing them because I was on deadline for scripts.  The writing deadlines are done for a minute, and I've gotten some media outlets asking to read a PDF of #1, so it seems prudent to finish up the lettering I can help them out.

On Wednesday a thousand of Diamond's top retailers got a promo copy of the #0 issue we did for SDCC 2010.  Hopefully they'll check it out, like it, and up their orders, but we'll see.  (I know one copy ended up in the hands of one Jason A. Quest, and the retailer in Anchorage, Alaska (Lukas' hometown) put their copy for sale with this week's Image books; I don't know if they even realized it was by Alaskan creators.)

We're also getting #0 ready for other uses, but I can't go into those until they're officially announced.  Suffice to say, they involve SHEAR AWESOMENESS.

Tonight I also did a bunch of research about vampire bats, and some thinking about stories.  I've got vampires on the brain again.

BrandonSeifert

Staying up too late thinking about vampires.

Lots of material there that nobody ever goddamn touches.  They just do the same stale incestuous rehashes of other vampire fiction, they don't put any thought into what they're dealing with or research the beliefs the fiction was originally based on.  (What Charles Stross once called the Second Artist Effect:  "The first artist sees a landscape and paints what they see; the second artist sees the first artist’s work and paints that, instead of a real landscape.")

In folklore, vampires were very different, and there was a lot of variety between the regional varieties.  Most kinds couldn't blend in with normal humans; they were too monstrous.  They didn't have fangs.  They were red-cheeked and often bloated, swollen up leech-like with the blood they're consumed.  Sunlight didn't hurt them; some weren't even nocturnal, several different kinds were only active from noon until midnight.  Staking didn't kill them, it just incapacitated them; frequently you had to do a bunch of other stuff, like cut off their heads, stuff their mouths with garlic, bury them in certain ways, or (in my favorite case) boil the head in a mixture of melted snow and vinegar for an amount of time delineated by church bells or a priest's pocket watch.

So how did those guys turn into the sun-fearing, easily-staked lotharios of today?  Because in Witch Doctor, inevitably, vampires used to be that way.  That's the fun thing I've been thinking about for a while.

BrandonSeifert

(Of course, that means we've got at least three different kinds of vampires in Witch Doctor — New World/Common Vampires, Old World Vampires, and "living vampires" based on Romanian folklore... That's a lot of vampires.)

MaxVaehling

They could hate each other and each consider their own kind the only real vampires. Maybe call each other Werewolves. Certainly makes more sense than the overused vampires vs. werewolves trope we've been seeing in the last couple of years...

JasonAQuest

Vampires as Galapagos finches?

GregCarter

Vampire war! With humans as The Prize. Vampire vs vampire is always popular.

Guilty! I totally cheated. I took a Sumarian demon that has vampiristic tendencies and made her the first vampire. And since then I've explained practically nothing even though I've done a ton of research and created a whole new mythology in my head. But I'm doing urban fantasy, not horror. Oh, and that's how vampires got corrupted - romanticizing them in novels and then movies. Among other things, they needed to have easily exploitable weaknesses so they could mingle with the humans and not just be monsters.  

There are so many possibilities to vampires. It's always nice when someone takes them a "new" direction. 

BrandonSeifert

@MaxVaehling, the funny thing about the "vampires vs. werewolves" thing is that in a lot of folklore the two were kind of merged — you had blood drinking werewolves like the Vrykolakas (I'm impressed that I spelled that correctly from memory), and there was the common belief that werewolves would come back as vampires after they died.

Another of the things I'm not into in modern vampire fiction is the constant humanizing of vampires.  If vampires are basically just people, only EVIL — I've seen that already.  So vampires who feel human emotions like hatred, divide the world into "us vs. them" or go to "war" with each other like @GregCarter suggested... that's not my thing.  Unless you take it to the logical extreme, and make vampires just people with different dietary needs and a sensory system cued to them — normal human food smells bad but blood smells delicious.  I guess I'm most interested by the extremes of the concept.

@JasonAQuest, that's an interesting comparison.  I was thinking more like rats, where there's more variety of species in the Old World, and fewer in the Americas.  (In European vampire folklore you had some specialist species of vampires, ones that only preyed on children or new mothers or stuff like that.)

SteveWallace

@BrandonSeifert I believe the Japanese have that same sort of specialist vampire in their Yokai myth. I don't have time to pull out my research but I'm pretty sure I there are a few in there. (I had done a crap ton of Yokai research for a book I was writing a few years ago.)

CaseWagner

This thread must be cursed by the Vampyr! When I tried to respond earlier my keyboard failed.

My vampires aren't the romantic type either. Purely primordial and devoid of social skills. Like Cordyceps for humans

BrandonSeifert

@SteveWallace, was it the hannya, who drink the blood of children?  I'm not familiar with too many bloodfeeders from Japanese mythology, and I don't know of any bloodfeeding Japanese undead.  (There's specialist bloodfeeders all over Southeast Asia, especially some that drink the blood of pregnant women and fetuses in the womb.)

@CaseWagner I've got my own plans for Cordyceps (naturally!), but it's not related to vampires.  I'm personally fine with sexy vampires (sexiness is a well-documented hunting strategy among predators in folklore), but I'm not very interested in vampire romance as a genre.

BrandonSeifert

Let's try posting an image.  Here's the cover for Witch Doctor #2, which comes out in July.

Witch Doctor #2 (of 4), on sale July 20, 2011 from Skybound Entertainment/Image Comics.

Another foray into medical horror from Robert Kirkman’s Skybound Originals line! Is your baby really your baby — or is it a camouflaged monster that’s feeding on you while you sleep? An infestation of Cuckoo Faeries is spreading through the nurseries of Arkham, Oregon, and it’s up to Dr. Vincent Morrow, the Witch Doctor, to stop it! So why doesn’t he want to bother? Plus: Shark cage diving with sea monsters!

$2.99, 32 pages, Diamond order code MAY110542

BrandonSeifert

I keep producing first drafts of scripts that I'm extremely unhappy with, and then sending them out for comments and hearing "This is the best script you've ever produced."  A little perplexed by that.  Not sure if my internal barometer of what is and isn't good in my work is way off, or if I just have a stronger understanding of how much of my potential I'm not yet living up to.

JonMunger

It's funny, I've been doing a lot of thinking about vampires myself, but coming from the opposite direction.  How do you make Vampires--pale people with superhuman powers and smashing fashion sense-- frightening again.  I figure the best way to do it is to treat them as social monsters.  Being in a room with a vampire would be like being in a room with Patrick Bateman from American Psycho.  Amorality with a thin veneer of civility.

BrandonSeifert

"How do you make Vampires--pale people with superhuman powers and smashing fashion sense-- frightening again.  I figure the best way to do it is to treat them as social monsters."

That's what I'm trying to do too, but honestly I think there's a variety of ways to do it.

I found an 18th century description of how vampire-feeding presents yesterday, from Hungary.  Lassitude, loss of appetite, visible weight loss, plus delusions of persecution — specifically the delusion that a white specter is following them everywhere.  The victim dies 8-10 days after presentation of symptoms, without fever or any other symptoms of illness, except for emaciation.

I've found that ridiculously inspiring today.  I think one of the scariest things about vampires in folklore and older vampire fiction was that most of them didn't just kill you outright, they stalked you and haunted you, they snuck into your house while you were asleep and defenseless and fed on you, and the next day you couldn't tell they'd been there.  And they kept it up while you wasted away and died.  That's far scarier to me than the "rip your throat out in a back alley" vamps we see now.

JonMunger

Much love to the Buffster, but the vampire as rabid dog with kung fu just doesn't make me brown my trousers.

BrandonSeifert

Likewise.  Same with 30 Days of Night, and Blade.  I'm much more interested in the vampire-as-parasite than the vampire-as-predator.

JensAltmann

Or the vampire-as-love-interest. I completely agree that the vampire-as-parasite is the scariest of them all.

BrandonSeifert

Yeah, vampire-as-love-interest isn't something I'm interested in seeing until somebody puts some new spin on it.

MaxVaehling

I used to be scared of vampires as a kid because, in the old movies, they were strong, invasive and viral. Now they seem so ... managable. So, totally agreeing on the vampire-as-parasite thing. Scary!

JasonAQuest

The predatory/viral aspect of vampires has always struck me as a good metaphor for the fundie paranoia about homosexuals (or vice versa): parasitic monsters who expand their kind only by violating the innocent, causing them to become monsters themselves.

BrandonSeifert

@JasonAQuest — I think one of the endearing strengths of vampires is that they can be seen in so many different ways, and can be plugged into so many different allegorical roles.  Personally, that's not one I probably ever would've thought of.

When are you going to see you do GAYCULA?

BrandonSeifert

Lukas and I have been building Witch Doctor for coming up on four years.  For a while I was really happy about the level of detail we'd gotten to.  Now, I'm starting to realize — holy crap, we've got a lot of stuff in here!  Characters, competing organizations, ecosystems of monsters, pages and pages of story plans...  There's a lot of moving parts!

The project is definitely richer for it, but it means it's hard to know what to do next.

BrandonSeifert

One of the hardest parts of this year so far has been juggling my day job and Witch Doctor.  I went up to four days a week so I could afford cons... but that didn't leave me with the time or energy to write scripts.  So I dropped down to three days a week, although that means I barely clear my bills.

I also switched from working weekends to not working weekends, so I could get time off for cons more easily.  that, too, was a mistake.  Weekdays at my job are much busier and more stressful — and on top of that, my publisher is only in the office on weekdays, so that's when I'm getting emails, phone calls and deadlines.

This week I went back to working weekends and one week day a week.  And wow, it's already made a huge difference!  Now I can generally just work *one* job at a time, rather than trying to work both on the same days.  And I'd forgotten how restful weekends can be at the place were I work!  So I'm already feeling better and less stressed.

JasonAQuest

I seriously wish I could do something like this.  I used to have a 20-30 hours/week job that paid me almost enough to live on, and left me with enough time and energy to work on creative things.  But that position got cut immediately when they had to trim staff.  Now working full-time I have more money (including enough that I can afford to feed a minimum-wage housemate and his student boyfriend), but I'm sneaking my comics work in during my lunch breaks, and dragging it out of me on weekday evenings when I'm stressed and tired, and spending lovely weekend afternoons indoors at the computer.

As for Gaycula, I'd have figure out how to do it as either full-on horror or totally raunchy porn (or both).  Otherwise it'd degenerate into vamp-camp, and the world needs a fey gay vampire story about as much as it needs non-ironic byronic goth vampires.

anthonyperuzzo

Day Jobs suck. Seems lately, all I do at my day job is think about the comic project I'm not working on. Hrrmph.

JohnBivens

After I finish moving I will be jumping up to 40 hours per week, and tacking on a little bit of teaching at NIU net year.  This will be a test as to how much my mental state survives, and how badly it effects any comic work I want to do.

DanHill

I'm in a day job that approaches forty hours a week. I currently still manage to write for several hours every day of the week. But only just. God help me when a kid gets thrown into the mix. 

Kudos to those of you who manage to balance it all out. 

BrandonSeifert

@DanHill — My problem was that I was getting several hours of Witch Doctor work in on the days when I also had to work my day job, but it was all lettering, logistics, PR stuff, replying to emails and coordinating with Lukas.  I didn't have enough time left over for the actual *writing*.

DanHill

@BrandonSeifert -Yikes. I hadn't even thought of that. So is that more evenly balanced now? I'm speaking from a position of not having work published with such a high profile as Witch Doctor,  so I'm curious does the PR and logistical side of things taper down once that first issue is out of the gate? Or does the opposite occur? Just curious. . . 

(It goes without saying that the lettering side of things remains constant, unless you're doing a silent issue at some point in the future)

BrandonSeifert

@DanHill — Honestly, I'm doing more work now than I was.  More lettering, more publicity stuff (now that we've been officially announced), more coordinating.  I'm sure the PR stuff will die down a bit once we're into the thick of it, but that won't be until #1 comes out in June at least.  But it's all much easier to manage now that I've rearranged my schedule, and since I got my most pressing deadlines out of the way.