To kick off the new year we will be featuring an interview I did with the creative team behind Carpe Chaos. Last week we did a feature on Carpe Chaos and the talented people behind it. I spoke with the guys about their inspiration for the vivid culture they have created for Carpe Chaos. I also spoke with them about artistic freedom among multiple creators.
The interview below features Jason and Eric, who are the creators and writers of Carpe Chaos as well as Anthony and Joe who are the stories featured artists.
How did Carpe Chaos first get started?
Eric: Like most projects, it didn’t know what it was when it began. It started life as a freshman video game project (and that’s probably why our comic appeals to gamers as often as it does), and like most freshman video game projects petered out by sophomore year. At some point Jason asked me if I could revive the stories we were planning to tell into a webcomic. It sounded like a good idea so I encouraged him to move forward. He got the ball rolling and before long I was checking in on his progress and pestering him to make it better. I had been day dreaming my own stories about Carpe Chaos since freshman year and so I shared those with Jason as well. I sank so deep in the project that I couldn’t escape being its Creative Director, and over the years I’ve put in a lot of the work that’s made it what it is today.
Jason: Like Eric said, we originally started creating the Carpe Chaos universe for a game when we were freshmen in college. The project died when we realized we would actually need to code the thing at some point, and we all let it go and focused on our studies instead. Halfway through senior year I found myself thinking about the project more and more, not the game idea so much as the universe ideas that we (mostly Eric) came up with in our planning meetings. I wanted to explore that universe without all of the technical hangups that come with making a video game, so I thought, why not make comics? I began assembling a team of artists on the Internet and lured Eric in with all of the cool art they were making. Once Eric was participating and directing the artists to make his visions a reality we had all the pieces we needed to make the project happen. And from there it just developed, and developed, and developed…
The Carpe Chaos universe has a rich history and culture for all of it’s alien races, how did you guys as a team develop these cultures.
Eric: A lot of this stuff comes from our own experiences of human cultures. We mix and match stuff from history classes, Discovery Channel specials, world travel, and our friendships with people from other cultures. I think Jason and I have a fairly broad multi-cultural experience for a pair of straight white males, and everything we’ve learned has shaped our comic. For example, I was deadlocked with the Kaean religion for a long time, but when I visited India and saw the Ashrams and shrines that dotted the countryside, a wealth of new ideas started flowing and Lhytanism blossomed into what it is today. Sometimes the histories are purely imagination as well; the Porg Hell War is a refresh of the old nuclear winter stories, sort of re-imagining those fears as something more relevant to the current social climate.
Why did you decide to release Carpe Chaos as a web comic?
Jason: We wanted the independence. We built this thing, the Carpe Chaos thing, and we wanted to show it to the world without having to bend or warp the content to meet some publisher’s marketability requirements or whatever. Self-publishing is the purest way to make what you want, and that freedom continues to appeal to us. And the cheapest, easiest way to self-publish is to post things on the web! At this stage we care most about sharing our comics with as many people as possible, and web publishing is the best way to do that!
Eric: It’s so much easier to jump onto the web and just throw your stories out there. Printing books was never something we thought we could go straight into, and our ability to print books has lagged behind our webcomic by quite a lot. And really, I feel like the comic medium is going to inevitably move toward digital comics. I think particularly the indie and floppy segments are going to move almost completely to digital formats. Printing books is hard. Marketing books is harder. And the truth is, every day it gets harder and harder as the print industry as a whole shrinks.
Any plans to bring Carpe Chaos to print?
Eric: You can already buy our first 7 stories in an anthology in our webstore: http://store.carpechaos.com/ And we’ve been selling individual chapters of Jailing Fortune as a convention exclusive. We’ll be printing some more stuff soon, so keep your eye on our blog for details.
For the writers of Carpe Chaos, how do you keep the tone and history of each story accurate while several other people are also working in the same universe?
Jason: Each writer has a lot of freedom within his or her story, because our graphic novels aren’t directly related to one another beyond being in the same universe. We don’t really have a set genre, and that makes it easy to write pretty much whatever we want. The challenge comes in the universe consistency. We have a singular timeline, meaning that if a story is set 1,000 years before another story, the technology is going to be pretty different between them for example. The setting and situations have to be appropriate to the cultures and times and locations involved!
Eric: Tyranny and a Spiked Iron Fist! As the Creative Director it’s my job to be make sure everything lines up. We have a wiki that has over 1000 printed pages of documentation about the universe and I’m constantly referencing it to keep everything straight. It’s really not that hard of a process, since most stories only touch on one small part of the universe, and we only need to write 1 chapter a month to keep up. In little bite-sized chunks like that it doesn’t cause too much trouble. The hardest parts though are keeping track of what was developed when, to make sure nothing in the background is out of order.
What comics inspired you as writers, artists, and creators?
Eric: The Warcraft and Starcraft lore were really influential in how I appreciate and create worlds with a ton of breadth and interconnection. I remember reading a little snippet about Garona the Assassin in the Warcraft 1 manual, and years later I kept seeing what seemed like a one-off character keep weaving herself back into the world. I LOVED that experience, it was like meeting an old friend unexpectedly. Carpe Chaos readers have already met some of these same kind of recurring characters, who will continually weave their ways back into the audience’s view.
Tolkien’s approach to an incredibly detailed and documented world is also instrumental. Hearing the stories about his pages pages of notes really told us that that kind of realism is possible, and pushed us to pursue it.
There’s a thousand smaller influences as well. I really like the Every Man nature of Star Trek; the idea that while Starfleet is certainly made of the best of the best, each person has their own contribution to make, and it’s not a story about some Jedi, Superhero, or Genius Inventor who has to do all the important work alone.
Anthony: I am ashamed to admit that I am not into comics. Not that I couldn’t get into it if I tried harder… I’m actually a lot more inspired by TV shows and movies. I am a sucker for good acting with raw dialogue. I like to visualize how reality looks in hard lines and flat colors… or any other style of art.
Joe: I think the comics that inspired me have found very little success. Hah hah. Vagabond by Mat Broome (I think only one issue was made). Defiance by Kanno Kang and Zack Suh (mini-series). Way of the Rat by Crossgen. Deicide. Glimmer Rats (graphic novel).
You guys were at APE this year, how has your reception into the indie comic community been?
Jason: The indie comics scene has a lot of authors and artists who draw in a simpler and sometimes black-and-white style, so we don’t fit in as well. We’re indie but we’re still a team of people, we’re a webcomic but we’re also a graphic novel, we’re sharp and polished when people that read indie comics often expect something more raw. I think a better way to think of us would be an independent studio that produces nothing but Carpe Chaos comics. We did get to join The Antidote Trust, an independent comic creator collective that we do shows with and talk comics with. They’ve been really great.
Eric: I wasn’t at APE this year, but from my other experiences: sometimes I feel like we’re too mainstream for the usual indie crowd. It might be our art, they might have a sort of immediate turn-off that if we look this good we must be retelling the same ole corporate stories. Or maybe Space Opera is too mainstream now and people really do want something even more “out there”. But really though, I don’t know why more people don’t gobble us up and share us with their friends. (If you’re reading this and you like our comic, use this moment to tell everyone you know to go read it).
Anthony: I certainly didn’t feel like a stranger. I worked in the industry a bit before Carpe Chaos.
Joe: I was at SDCC. We seemed popular with the females. Apparently Porgs are very female-friendly.
The Alien types in Carpe Chaos are all very different and unique, what influenced the design for each race?
Eric: At least a dozen things each. I have a design philosophy that revolution is impossible to reproduce. You can only reliably produce evolution. Take existing designs, what people think of as familiar and common, then make a few small changes to get something a little different. Luckily, you can give the illusion of a revolution by making lots of short evolutions. Take a design, evolve it a tiny bit, then a tiny bit more, do a new revision based on the old one, iterate, iterate, iterate, and when you show the final product to someone, they won’t be able to follow the design’s growth. It’ll look totally new and unique, but you’ll know it’s just one step past your previous design.
Jason: So many of our design iterations were inspired by the vast array of plant and animal life on our planet. I think when we discover alien civilizations we will find that the creativity of their sci-fi alien designs will be directly proportional to the species diversity on their planets!
Anthony: The designs are heavily directed by Eric. I just make sure they worked both mechanically and visually. When something is off or missing, it usually triggers something in me. When I can’t put my finger on something, this is where reference pictures clear the fog. And only nature has the answers.
What’s next for Carpe Chaos
Jason: We have a huge story planned, easily over 200 pages. It’s got action, comedy, more action, and even more action. It’s going to be great—I mean spaceship battles, rocket launchers, the works. We’ve already started working on the first chapter. I can’t wait until we have something to show, because it’s turning out so well! Our plan is to divide it into several volumes, with each volume being under or around 100 pages subdivided into chapters. Look for that to kick off on CarpeChaos.com around March. We’ll also be at WonderCon, Comic Con, APE, and hopefully Comikaze in 2012, so if you’re at any of these California conventions please find us and introduce yourself!
Any last minute advice for aspiring comic artist, writers, or creators?
Eric: Write, draw, post, improve. Just get in and do it. Start with a small project with a discrete ending. Finish it, post it on the web, move on to the next slightly larger project. Then do that and do it well. Do it again. Then think up something really cool to do and finish that. Always push yourself to grow and actually do the work. There’s no way to get better other than to do something lots and do it fast. Once you’ve proven that you can finish a few projects you can start throwing them away before you finish them until you get just what you want, but make sure you learn how to finish stuff first. Buckle down and get it done. Focus on the core of your content, not things like how good your website looks. Get your website just good enough and go make your comic. You can fix your website when someone complains about wanting a new feature, in the meantime write, draw and post!
Jason: Sometimes sitting down and beginning to create what you have in your head is the hardest thing to do, because in your head you see the potential and it’s great, but when you make it a reality suddenly you’re vulnerable to everyone’s opinion of what you made. They’re judging your idea, and they’re judging how well you executed that idea, how well you brought it into being. My advice is to immediately stop caring, do it anyway, accept the criticism, learn from it, and then do it all over again. The only way to improve is through practice, and the more you practice the better you’ll be able to handle being judged harshly. Don’t let yourself become paralyzed by fear, because the worst that can happen isn’t even worth fearing.
Anthony: Detach yourself from your work. It’s true we can put a lot of time and effort into something, so we expect it to look good. But that can be misleading and mess with your perception. It’s more important to focus on progress, not what you can ultimately do best NOW. And this is because you can always do better no matter what. So just keep racking up that experience, and look back once in a while to see how far you’ve gone.
Joe: I think it’s easy to lock yourself up in a room and just work but try to occasionally work with other artists watching you and try to be around other artists when they’re working. You’ll learn much quicker and become more self-aware of your bad habits without anybody even pointing them out.
[End Interview]
Thanks again to Eric, Jason, Anthony and Joe for taking the time to answer some questions for me. You can check out Carpe Chaos below.
Tags: Carpe Chaos, interview
