About
Rik at work
A Song Called City is ‘an epic tale of modern magic’. It is the story of a girl who slowly discovers there’s more to the world than we’ve been told in school. It is the story of an old shaman, who isn’t seeking an apprentice — but well, you don’t always get to choose, do you? It is the story of a city and its people, their everyday lives and extraordinary souls. It’s about magic, death, sex and life. It’ll be around for a couple of years. It’s an online comic, updating twice a week — and you can start reading it here.
Rik Willemen (the author) is a sort-of-young person who draws pictures. He’s also an art teacher, giver of workshops and freelance illustrator. But first and foremost, there’s a need to tell stories burning deep within his heart (and ego). A Song Called City — its artwork, the characters, the story — is the main pulsing vein in his day-to-day life, and an oxygen-rich vein it is.
A Song Called City is now a solo-project, but used to be a product of Rik’s co-authorship with Bram Michielsen — a word-smith by craft, who maintains a busy twitter feed.
It was nice to meet you at DIY day in KASK. To be honest, your project is not impressive… Blog is too complex and visuals are pretty standard.
The magic’s natural form is fairytale… not an intellectual ranting about philosophy of life that shows to everyone your university education. It does not work that way. The blog should be a sequencer of modern fairy tales… in Hans Christian Andersen style.
And visuals should be more sophisticated… If you do it exclusive on-line then why not to use all those magic opportunities of internet and computer… like video’s, animations, web-cameras, links, hidden stories, real-time traces, …. all that reality-show magic, that is impossible to do in normal comics. Make it alive… make it be never the same story.
Thank you for taking the time to look at our project–and thank you for leaving feedback. We try to offer up a little bit of everything in our blogs: they are intended to offer some additional content from both authors, ranging from our experiences with city life to philosophical ponderings.
We have no intention of working with multi-medial techniques anytime soon, since most of those have a pretty far-reaching narrative impact and we wouldn’t want to have style tower over substance. We do plan on releasing additional, canonical short-stories and more fun stuff like canonical RPG campaigns or perhaps even a little videogame. Who knows. But that’s ways off yet. So stay tuned for now, and thanks for reading!
Greetings fellow artist Rik The Mighty,
I’ve been send here by thine herald called ‘Bram’, to awake the modern beast called ‘Twitter’! Thy shall call upon it and build a grand account worthy of legends and mighty deeds. Deep down, thou know this is thine calling … Deep down, thou will do this for thine many, many fans …
Also, very impressed by your accomplishments with the comic so far, mate. It’s getting better with each page; love this ‘dark’ setting it’s in atm
Keep it up!
-Cheers,
Me