Written Q/A with Jakob Free on Cities Of Magick

W) Jakob Free, Will Tempest (A) Will Tempest

Previews: JAN221621

Lunar: 0122SC216

I’m a sucker for a good Post-Apocalyptic tale set in the not so distant future. Maybe I’m a bit too intrigued by a world without social media distractions, oh and Magic. Ok, maybe not the latter. That’s exactly what Jakob Free & Will Tempest gave me. Cities of Magick is a good western style story set in the remnants of “Old York City” where Magick thrives and people don’t even know what a Nike Swoosh is. We follow a gun toting young man obsessed with the “Analog” who provokes a Priestess, a series of warring factions… I mean. What else do you need? I had some questions that needed to be answered. I had the opportunity to speak with Jakob Free about “Cities Of Magick”. Now I’m even more excited!

Jakob your Story takes place 150 years in the future, but “Magick” is present. We meet a young man obsessed with the “analog.” So tell me a little bit about this unique set up and how you and co-creator Will Tempest cooked it up.

In 2017 or thereabouts, I was feeling incredibly burned out by technology. Specifically, I was overwhelmed with all of my digital devices. My connection to my phone, my tablet, and my computer was beginning to feel like an addiction. So I began to daydream about a world without these items. 

I imagined a place that had moved beyond digital technology, social media, self-driving cars, and all that. What would that world look like? What would the people who lived in it do all day? How would everything work?

The answer, of course, was magic (or as we spell it in our book, “magick”). 

So I began to travel to these places in my mind, these cities powered by municipal magic taps, where people took unicorn drawn carriages to get to work and bought magic clothes at magic boutiques. Strangely enough, there was never a time during all this daydreaming that I thought these cities were in made up places like Middle Earth or anything like that. I thought they were our cities. New York, Chicago, Las Vegas, San Francisco, and on and on. These places already have so much character to them already. Why not superimpose this magic status quo on what already exists?

But I still needed a character to make his way though that world. The most interesting thing I could think of was that this person needed to be a sort of reverse-luddite, a pro-technology guy. But the joke is, he doesn’t really know an iphone from an electric razor. All that stuff is in some idealized past for him. He wants to live in a golden age the he—and everyone else—knows very little about. 

That’s how I arrived at a story that takes place 150 years from today, in magic cities, with a guy who doesn’t like magic. Lev, our hero, has a problem that is the exact opposite of mine. I wanted to get rid of all my technology and he wanted to pick it all up. You put someone like that in the middle of a big magic war and, well, you’ve got yourself a comic book.

These were all just ideas though. There was nothing I could do with this story on my own. 

I had been following Will Tempest for a while at that point and I really loved his work. Will is a cartoonist, a one-man team. He writes and draws his own stuff. So he gets how storytelling works in comics. This is a great position for a writer like me to be in because what winds up happening is that there’s actually two writers on the creative team. It means that as we went along, from issue to issue, I actually had to write less and less in the scripts to communicate what I thought were interesting visual or narrative concepts. I think by the end of it, I really gave up on things like panel layouts and composition suggestions and all that stuff. Will doesn’t need it because he’s about a million times better at it than I am. 

Will is also a genius visual designer. All the technology and mechanisms and decoration in his work is so well-imagined and executed that it feels like he’s drawing from real life sometimes, like he went out on trip to a space station or some mystical kingdom and drew the people he saw there. In that way, I imagined, he was doing the sort of thing I did when I thought up the initial idea for Cities of Magick. We were both stepping into these places and recording what we saw.

I eventually worked up the courage to reach out to him, send him the script, and ask if he was interested in working on the book with me. When he said “yes” I just knew something was clicking into place. And then when he showed me his first batch of designs, I felt that feeling again. That’s because I wasn’t being shown what I wanted to see, but rather what Cities of Magick required. 

It’s one thing to think up a machine, but you need an actual engineer who is smart and went to school and knows what they’re doing to build the damn thing. Will is that genius virtuoso who takes a few paltry sheets of paper and builds a massive clockwork mechanism that’s different and better than what you expected, but more than that it serves the overall endeavor in a way that you could never have done on your own.

Is this an ongoing or limited series?  

The world of Cities of Magick can’t really be fully explored in a limited series. There’s so many places Will and I can go with it. It seems silly to keep it contained to just two cities in the future Not-So-United States of America. Especially when you consider that one half of the CoM creative team lives on another continent. We could easily do a whole other story in London or Edinburgh or Tokyo or Paris or wherever.

That being said, we didn’t want to get too ahead of ourselves with this introductory story. That is why this first arc of Cities of Magick will unfold across 5 issues. Those 5 issues are self-contained. You can read them and get a full story, beginning, middle, and end. 

HOWEVER, if it turns out that readers want more, we have so many places we can take them in future limited series or one-shots or graphic novellas.

Long story short: Cities of Magick is a 5-issue limited series, but with potential for much more.

What can we expect from Cities Of Magick as the story progresses?

I promise people that this story is not what it looks like. Whichever way you think it’s going, it is not. Cities of Magick is ostensibly a “future-fantasy western” but there’s so much more going on under the hood that the description really fails to capture the true nature of the book. 

Without giving too much away, readers can expect cowboy vs wizard action, Game of Thrones-style intrigue, magical travelogue sequences, anthropological explorations of Old York City and the Chicago Conglomerate, magical fashion, maps, diagrams, and one very magical dog. If that doesn’t do anything for you, then I don’t know what more I can say that will get you onboard!

Special thanks to Jakob Free for taking the time to speak with me. I was stoked about this book before, but now this is definitely going into my Pull List! Stay tuned for a Long Form interview going even deeper into the creative process when we get Jakob & Will scheduled.

Joey Galvez- Host