'Witch Doctor' has more magic the second time around

• 'Witch Doctor' returns with new miniseries
• Magic plays more of a role as a parallel to modern medicine
• More monsters per issue than ever before

The Witch Doctor is in. Again.

The horror-meets-medicine Image Comics/Skybound book by writer Brandon Seifert and artist Lukas Ketner is back again with a new miniseries. There's a change in bedside manner, though: While last year's original five-issue Witch Doctor focused on monsters as medical metaphors — such as a demonically biological take on a goathead pentagram — magic gets the emphasis in the six-part Witch Doctor: Mal Practice, debuting Nov. 28.

"In Witch Doctor, we don't have white and black magic, but what can be this great lifesaving spell in one person's hands can also be this awful thing in someone else's hands," Seifert says.

"And because there's also a medical metaphor, we can do scenes like bad spell interactions where you do two spells that don't mix well in your body and can cause side effects."

Witch Doctor: Mal Practice brings back its main M.D., the House-inspired occult physician Dr. Vincent Morrow, plus his faithful assistants, paramedic Eric Gast and the possessed young woman known as "Penny Dreadful."

After a long day of ridding a cursed boy of a scary larva monster caused by a witch, the trio call it a night, and Morrow hits the local bar, where he meets a comely redhead. The next morning he wakes up with no memory — enough to freak anybody out but a cause for panic for the good doctor.

"He could have been poisoned, drugged or infected with something. There's all kinds of bad things that could have gone wrong," Seifert says.

"We've always seen him be very detached and very cynical and snarky about his cases, and it's much more difficult for him to do that when the patient is him."

The six issues follow these worst 36 hours of his life, and it's a change in story structure from the original miniseries, which took more of a self-contained "monster of the week" approach each issue — with vampires, fairies, demons and even the Creature from the Black Lagoon — that helped make Witch Doctor a favorite among comic-book fans.

"I've honestly had some trepidation about mixing things up for the second miniseries because it had been successful," Seifert says. However, Ketner adds that he's not worried: "There's really nice slices of cake each month."

Fans will see a new side of Morrow as he's put in a position of diagnosing himself, and more aspects will be revealed about Penny and especially Eric. "We've led people to believe he's the normal one, but he actually has his own mystical secrets that we haven't seen yet," says Seifert, confirming the return of necromancer mythologist Catrina Macabrey and the addition of one new regular supporting cast member by the end of the second miniseries.

How magic operates in the Witch Doctor universe has parallels to modern medicine, especially in that aspects of voodoo and other magical disciplines are mixed in a cauldron with stuff Seifert and Ketner have made up.

"It's fun to recognize new twists on things that people have seen before, in the same way we did some of the monsters in the first series," Ketner says. "There are definitely some recognizable bits of magic but they're used in different amusing ways."

There have been talks of Witch Doctor crossing over onto a TV screen and joining fellow Skybound comics The Walking Dead and Thief of Thieves to make that jump — "I just want to see things I made up in my head," Ketner says with a laugh — but certain existing shows have recently been a subconscious influence for Seifert.

House and Ghostbusters informed the first series, and Mal Practice shows signs of more Doctor Who, more Sherlock and even some Supernatural, a paranormal series that follows a lot of medical-drama conventions.

"There's always the diagnosis, they do a bunch of research, they think it's one thing, they try to treat that thing, it goes wrong and they discover it's something else. That's the plot of every House episode, and the plot of every Supernatural episode," Seifert says.

And Ketner, an artist weaned on the 1970s horror of Bernie Wrightson and Mark Schultz, has been studying the work of newer comics illustrators such as Sean Murphy (Punk Rock Jesus) and Greg Capullo (Batman) as well as getting into how insects and undersea creatures look.

"That always helps drawing monsters and looking at anatomy books to draw the insides of the body," Ketner says.

Magic may be playing an important role, but Witch Doctor: Mal Practice has a prescription for more monsters per issue than ever before and on an international scale.

Seifert and Ketner are using quite a few creatures from global folklore, including one each from Eastern Europe, the Caribbean and Southeast Asia.

"Some of them are more esoteric than others," Seifert says. "Some you might recognize the name but you don't necessarily recognize the traits. There are some monsters whose names get used a lot in American horror, and the monster isn't anything like the monster actually is in folklore.

"It ranges from cult-favorite monsters that aren't quite as well known to stuff that's pretty obscure."