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When we imagine ourselves out there in the cosmos, Touring the Cosmos if you will, our minds can only take us so far. We have been to Oa and Hala, Ysmault and Attilan. Now we are going to take a look at a part of the universe that is not as familiar. A new galaxy with new races and new planets. It is called Carpe Chaos!

Carpe Chaos is a monthly web comic that follows five alien races, and their struggles to find their place in the universe. These are all brand new aliens, in a brand new universe, and so far, there have been no human sightings. Co-writer Jason Bane had this to say of Carpe Chaos :

“Carpe Chaos is an independent science-fiction space opera about five alien races who learn to travel between stars, and it focuses on the ways their cultures collide and how they work to solve their problems. CarpeChaos.com features long-form comic chapters and publishes a new chapter on the first day of each month. There’s no one “hero story” that follows a single character throughout his or her transformative journey, but instead a series of short stories that all take place in the same galaxy (and the stories span thousands of years). There are six stories so far, and while the first five are only one chapter long, the latest comic (Rising Up) will run for four chapters.”

As soon as I heard about this, I knew I had to check it out. When I got to the Carpe Chaos site, I was blown away at the detail and effort put into it. I mean, you can really tell there is a labor of love here! The site was easy to navigate, and definitely matched the look and feel of the actual comics.

When I first opened the reader, I was pleasantly surprised. It opened easily and switched from page to page pretty cleanly. I’m not huge on web comics, so this being my first foray into this world, I was relieved to see how easy it was to get a hang of. So far I have seen credits for three different artists, which was kind of surprising. In a good way of course; I wouldn’t have been able to tell that there was any difference! I like the crisp, clean look of the art. It’s actually really refreshing to be able to easily distinguish everything. A lot of art I see nowadays is too busy, heavy on inks, and makes it hard to capture most details. With Carpe Chaos, everything is in plain sight with some great colors. I also want to note that I appreciate the effort by the artists when they make it easy to tell characters of the same race apart from one another.

So far, we have seen three different races. A lot of the stories (Hard Lessons, Worst Case Scenario, Strength in Numbers, Rising Up) involve the war-like Turikasuul, on the planet Suulmalla. Although at first they seem to be all about fighting, they do follow a code of honor, and certainly have a different lifestyle than we humans are used to. The Kaeans are seen in Moments of Elation (which can now be downloaded and read for free from iTunes, just search Carpe Chaos), which is based off a Kaean poem. Lastly, there is a short story involving the Porg, Helmut the Porg to be exact, which shows some segway action in Rurban Sprawl.

Reading the stories, the first thing I noticed was that you could really tell that a lot of thought has been put into the history of the characters and the universe. I wasn’t jumping into a half-baked story; I felt like I was reading into a whole new universe that had been around for a very long time. This is kind of hard to do when you are creating everything from scratch, but Carpe Chaos does it well. I also really liked the fact that these are all-ages tales, with something for everyone. Whether it’s relationships, humor, or fighting that you’re looking for, you will find it all here!

Carpe Chaos uploads a new comic chapter to the site on the 1st of each month, a new blog post about making comics on the 10th of each month, and other, smaller updates as they have time. You can also find them on a few social networks: Twitter, Facebook, and DeviantArt.

Come back next segment for an interview with some of the Carpe Chaos team!

Mike Parente
mike@comicattack.net