About

Click here for a video with much more of the interview with Eric.

The Intro

Welcome to our Kickstarter page! I'm Jason Bane, and together with Eric Carter, Anthony Cournoyer, Daniel Allen, Joe Slucher, and many others I've worked to create Carpe Chaos, the free web-based sci-fi graphic novel series published on CarpeChaos.com. But what you don't see in the comics is all of the artwork we produced when we were creating the universe. We actually spent several years building the universe before we began making comics, and like Eric said in the video we've been searching for a way to show it off.

Eric, Anthony, and I at Wizard World Chicago, surrounded by concept art!

After running tables at conventions, making a DeviantArt gallery, starting a wiki on our site, tweeting preview images on Twitter, and everything else... we're figuring out that organizing everything into a comprehensive concept art book is the best way to show people our humungous universe.

The Book

So we want to create a concept art book called "The Art of Carpe Chaos." We've got a ton of material, we've got graphic designer Christopher Kosek to help us, and we've got a $7,500 quote from a printer. Whether we get 250 books or 1000, the price doesn't change much because most of the printing costs are for getting everything set up to print in the first place. 100% funding means a print run for us! Here's a rough idea of what the front and back covers will look like:

The book itself will be about 150 pages, and if we raise more than 100% of our goal then we'll be able to expand it because we have enough material to fill 300 pages or more. The book will have as much awesome stuff as we can cram into it, including:

The designs for the Porgs, Kaeans, Turikasul, Xotron, and Embarnik, as well as our more minor races like the Garnams, Astavers & Dovars, Breydolans, and more

The clothing and costume concepts for all of the species that, you know, wear clothes

The weapons concepts, plus other miscellaneous technology like respirator masks and local transportation vehicles

The scenes we've painted for the different environments and the creatures that inhabit them

The architecture styles of the different races, both modern and ancient

The different spaceship designs we've made for each of the races. We have over 100 and you can see many of them in the video, and below:

Space environments like starscapes, planets, and the 4th-dimensional travel network known as "the tubes"

A bonus 4-page comic featuring the Embarnik that won't be released on CarpeChaos.com for some time

Artwork from many of our posters, prints, and comics

The Rewards

Firstly, anyone that gives $25 or more will get their name added to the credits page in the final book for their support.

The different reward levels are explained in the column to the right, but here are some details about the different stuff we have to show our appreciation to our backers:

PAPERCRAFT MODELS: Pieca and Nate are the two main characters from our comic Jailing Fortune, and we made them into papercraft models! Pieca the Porg is complete, and the model for Nate the Kaean is in progress.

T-SHIRTS: We have two T-shirt designs. We'll email you to ask which designs and sizes you want. We have the following sizes available: S, M, L, XL, XXL, and XXXL.

BOOKMARKS: We have 5 bookmark designs that we made to give out at shows, and they look pretty slick! Each set of 5 bookmarks will include one of each design.

ALIEN PIN-UP PRINTS: Each print is an 11x14 glamour shot of one of the aliens from Carpe Chaos. These are just preview thumbnails.

WALLPAPER POSTERS: If you want a Carpe Chaos wallpaper for your desktop you can have one for free! Just click here. Boom. Done. But we're also making posters out of them, and they'll measure approximately 30 x 17 inches.

LANDSCAPE PRINTS: These three landscape prints detail (from top to bottom) the homeworlds of the Turikasuul, Kaeans, and Porgs. They measure 30 x 22 inches and they're incredibly detailed. They look amazing at their full size!

CARPE CHAOS: IGNITION: This was the first book we made and we're running a little low on copies, which is why the reward level that includes them is capped at 15. It's over 100 full-color pages of the first comics we made.

MADE-TO-ORDER SKETCH CARDS: Anthony Cournoyer, the most senior and most prolific artist working on Carpe Chaos, has done sketch cards at some of the shows we've attended. They've been pretty popular! Unfortunately he's so busy working on our next big comic that we can't offer too many of these (he's basically doubling the amount of time he works to get his next comic done faster). The minimum pledge to get one is $250.

THE BOOK ITSELF: In the picture above a Kaean is holding Carpe Chaos Ignition because we don't have a picture of what the concept art book will look like yet! But once it's done, a copy of the book is the most important reward!

The "Stretch Goals"

If we're lucky enough to exceed our funding goal the first thing we'll do is make the book longer. We have enough artwork to make this book 300 pages instead of 150, but we would need more than $7,500 to make that happen. After that, who knows? We would think of something cool, for sure. But right now I'm just hoping we can make our goal of $7,500.

Thanks for reading our Kickstarter campaign!

-Jason

Note About The Video

Brian Bauer produced our Kickstarter video for us. Anton Patzner's music was used in the video, with permission.