Steampunk Ghostbusters: Witch Doctor: Mal Practice #3 Review

Witch Doctor has always been a book that has been pretty unabashed about wearing its influences on it’s sleeve. If you take a step back – and not even a big step – and unfocus your eyes a little bit, you can see past the characters on the page and see Ghostbuster jumpsuits, with Dr. Gregory House peeking out from Dr. Vincent Morrow’s eyes, and if you could get your hands on the plans for any given building, in the book, you’d probably see “Tim Burton, Architect” signed at the bottom.

This should be a recipe for disaster. After all, think about every groundbreaking hit movie you’ve seen, and then think about how many “homages” to that hit that came out a year and a half later, and how good they actually were. Sure, everyone loves Raiders of The Lost Ark, but a dare you to find me someone who pops wood over, say,Nate & Hayes, orHigh Road to Chinaor even someone who remembers them without resorting to IMDB – and one of those even starred the guy who was originally cast as Indiana Jones. Sure, the parts are all there, but just because they were magic in one place doesn’t mean they can work when you grab them and drop them someplace else.

So yeah: if you stop and think too much about Witch Doctor: Mal Practice #3 too much, you’ll see all the pieces working under the hood. And, depending on what kind of reader you are, that might prove too distracting to really get into the book. Which would be a shame, because even though you can see all the influences at work, writer Brandon Seifert and artist Lukas Ketner has put together one hell of a fun book, with entertaining and funny dialogue, nifty gadgets, and satisfying action. Sure, you’ve seen some of what underpins this story before… but you don’t see it done well often.

Dr. Morrow has an appointment to make; he has been infected with a deadly, mystical disease by a trio of unknown antagonists, who want to make an exchange: a secret spell book in exchange for the cure. The problem is, it turns out that the cure is supposedly in the book, which is a pretty unconvincing line of bullshit once everyone thinks about it for more than a second – if Morrow had the cure, wouldn’t he, you know, use it? – leading to a series of double and triple crosses and Morrow and the bad guy try to one-up each other to get what they want. And while it appears, at face value, that the bad guy is a shitty liar with a bullshit plan, maybe he has more on the ball than Morrow thinks. And that is looking more and more like a fatal underestimation.

How much you enjoy this book, up to a certain point, is going to hang on how much you like Dr. Morrow: an arrogant, sarcastic, imperious prick who is convinced he is the smartest person in the room at any given time, and who is often right about that. Morrow gets the best lines in the book, as he has in all the Witch Doctor comics to date, which are worth the price of admission… provided you like that kind of thing, although I can’t imagine anyone getting turned off by stuff like:

You’re… the, um, douchebag with the ridiculous name!

and:

Well, this has been one big, fat waste of my time. And thanks for giving me a disease!

Morrow’s characterization is worth the cost of admission; to go back to Indiana Jones, Morrow’s characterization can be summarized by Rover Phoenix and teenaged Indy in The Last Crusade, where he says, “Everyone’s lost but me.” The character’s arrogance in the face of crippling danger is, well, fun. Even if you’re not partial to supernatural or magic stories with a gothic bend, well, the dialogue in this book made me laugh out out more than a couple of times, and that’s worth dealing with almost any story; hell, for a good laugh, I’d sit through damn near anything.

Visually, the story really hearkens to a Tim Burton vibe, if Burton had an unlimited budget he didn’t feel the need to constantly piss away on Johnny Depp. Ketner gives us a mix of modern and gothic visuals, using a fine line that often has almost a sketched and abstract outline to it. Almost everything is grungy in almost a gaslight, Victorian way, from the hearse Morrow rides in to the grungy brick buildings in the background, while throwing in modern cell phones and some really cool and interesting gadgets and monsters. The portable defibbrilator backpack that Morrow’s assistant Eric uses as a weapon is a cool mix of steampunk design, medical equipment and Ghostbusters tech, and there’s no denying that Ketner delivers some damn imaginative monsters and supernatural effects. Between the Loogaroo and Autotomite monsters (particularly the Loogaroo, which appears to be a floating system of human organs and arteries with a hot girl’s face, that looks like something you’d see in a mescaline nightmare after a sharp blow to the head), the monsters alone are cool enough… but I was particularly impressed with Ketner’s depiction of Morrow’s Doctor Strange-style astral projection. Let’s just say that if Dr. Strange creator Steve Ditko had imagined the astral projection that way, he’d be screaming for the socialized medicine he’d need to buy the pills to make the images in his head stop.

Look: there is no denying that Witch Doctor: Mal Practice is a book that has been assembled from other influences. And even stripping those elements away, this is a story about a dude whose been given poison to force him to do things, and even that’s a story as timeworn as DOA. But Seifert and Ketner take these influences and story elements and wrap them with a truly engaging main character, some really funny dialogue, and really cool visuals. Sure, you’ll see the disparate influences working behind the scenes, but they have created a really fun read with some good laughs and gripping visuals, creating something that is greater than the sum of its parts. It might not be the most original book you’ll ever read, but it is fun, and that is enough.