Hey everyone,

Eric and I were at our table at WonderCon in Anaheim this past weekend. I got sick and missed Saturday, and Eric had to work on Friday, but together we made sure at least one of us was there for the entire show. I was really glad to meet everyone I did, and if you didn't see us at this show hopefully you'll catch us at a show in the future! Eric will be at San Diego Comic Con this year and I'll hopefully be at APE! I'm still recovering from the show and worrying about the last few days of our Kickstarter campaign, so I'll keep it short this time and just post some pictures:

Jason Bane presents: Carpe Chaos

Eric Carter demonstrates how to read a comic book for the uninitiated.

A Kaean papercraft model! Finally, you can make a Nate to go with Pieca.

A dynamic shot of our 11.5 foot long printout of Strength in Numbers.

Eric on the left, and Jason on the right, at the end of the show. Who wouldn't buy comics from these guys?!?!

-Jason

Did you get a Nate Kaean paparcraft model somehow? Well you've come to the right place. Together with Pieca, you can make both main characters from Jailing Fortune IN 3-D!

1. Cut out all the separate parts.

2. Make sure you know what's what!

3. Fold the toes and limbs in half.

4. After ensuring the halves are properly aligned, glue 'em up.

5. Fold the sides of the head along the middle strip.

6. Fold the top of the middle strip extending from the top of the head to form a Z shape.

7. Inwardly fold the two triangular flaps atop the sides of the head.

8. Along the fold lines, outwardly fold the two rectangular flaps at the bottom of the sides of the head, where the neck would be.

9. Apply glue to the backside of the section just above/behind the face.

10. Stick the triangialr flaps onto the aforementioned section.

11. The head should look something like this.

12. Inwardly fold everything along the middle strip of the body.

13. Along the fold line in the middle of the back, fold outwardly.

14. Along all of the other fold lines on the body, fold inwardly.

15. Apply glue to the backside of one of the sides of the body.

16. Stick the flaps along the middle strip to aforementioned side of the body.

17. Repeat for the other side of the body. Use the opening in the bottom as needed for applying pressure.

18. Apply glue to the bottom flaps of the head.

19. Stick it on the body, as shown.

20. Apply glue to the top-inside of the upper arm with the rock.

21. Stick it on the body in the designated area.

22. Repeat for the other upper arm.

23. Inwardly fold the flaps atop the lower arms.

24. Apply glue to aforementioned flaps.

25. Stick 'em on their designated areas on the body.

26. Cut small slits at the base of the legs, where the toes would go.

27. Apply glue to the top-inside of the forelegs.

28. Stick 'em on their designated areas on the body.

29. Repeat for hindlegs.

30. Fold the front part of the rock and insert the toes into the feet.

31. High-five nate (be gentle, he's made of paper).

-Leo

Happy new year, and also happy Chinese new year to you all. Carpe Chaos had a good end-of-year vacation and a great January publishing pages of The Myth of Midigan. The news has really been piling up so allow me to let you in on all the latest:

• Chapter 4 of Trading Tales: The Myth of Midigan is done, it's live on the site, and you can read it for free right now! The story will conclude with a Chapter 5 that we are planning to publish in April, if we can get it done that quickly. Things are reaching a climax, and if you loved that page spread at the end as much as I did, you can get it as a desktop wallpaper here:

• You may have noticed CarpeChaos.com was down on January 18th. We were one of the more than 100,000 sites that voluntarily went dark or otherwise altered our front page to protest the American censorship bills SOPA and PIPA. It had a huge impact and this article sums up the fallout pretty well.
• The indie comics blog Panel Bound did a big feature on us while we were on our vacation. They posted a writeup on Carpe Chaos on December 30th, and then on January 3rd they posted an interview they did with me, Eric, Anthony, and Joe. The interview turned out great, so click here if you want to learn more about how Carpe Chaos got started and how we make comics together.
• I rewrote the Advertise With Us and the Parental Advisory pages on the site to be more useful.
  • For the Ad page, I finally published some rates! If you want to add your full-page ad to the rotation in our digital comic books, you can do it for a scant $5 per month. And if you buy 10 months you get 2 more for free! Contact us!
  • For the Parental Advisory page, I made a list of all of our stories with my best guess as to whether they'd be OK for kids or not; I even consulted some actual parents. Let me know if you disagree with any of them. You can also use the links on that page if you want to grab the direct link to a specific story on the Comics page. Example: Reinvention.
• Jailing Fortune Chapter 4 has been added to Graphicly! Now you can own all 4 chapters of Jailing Fortune in your digital Graphicly library, and you can let Graphicly guide you through the pages with their special flow mode. Here's the preview:
  
• Speaking of Jailing Fortune, now that the story is done we're looking into making it available as a digital e-book on the Amazon Kindle Fire, in the Amazon Android App Store, in the Barnes & Noble Nook App Store, in the Apple Newsstand, and in the Kobo eBookstore. No promises yet but if we can get into that many eBookstores it would be pretty awesome! If we succeed, and if the comic does well enough, we'll put our other stories in those places too. Jailing Fortune and the rest of our stories are already available in Graphicly, which itself is available on several mobile devices, and we're still (slowly) working on our own iPhone & iPad app to show off our comics in a different way. Big plans, slow progress.
• Printing the 6 new wallpapers as posters is taking a little longer than originally planned but they should appear in the store in the next week or two. I'll post another update when they're ready!
• WonderCon is less than two months away! It's in Anaheim on March 16-18 this year, and we'll be there in the small press area for all 3 days. I'm already getting excited... it's been a few months since our last show! And we'll have some new stuff: the final chapters of Jailing Fortune as floppy comics and the 6 desktop wallpapers as posters. I try to keep our conventions page up-to-date so if you go there you can see our upcoming convention plans.
• I'm working on setting up a Kickstarter campaign for a book of Carpe Chaos concept art. It's our art the years we spent building the Carpe Chaos universe before we began making comics. We're still chasing printer quotes and producing the video (every Kickstarter campaign needs a video, right?) but if we can pull it off I hope to launch the campaign by the end of February. We have SO MUCH concept art that we want to show off, and a book of concepts seems like the best way to do it. We're really hoping people will back the project, not just because of the cool perks/rewards we have planned but also because the book is going to be killer. I mean, look at the concepts we have just laying around. For example, we have over 130 spaceship concepts. Why did we make so many?! I don't know! But we are putting them in this book! Expect another update from me on this in a month or so.
• Speaking of crowd-funding campaigns, Amya is running an Indiegogo campaign to fund the printing of the third chapter of the series. If you haven't heard of Amya before, give it a look and consider contributing to get the books!
• February's gonna be pretty awesome. Starting on February 4th we're going to update with a new page every single day until the new chapter is complete on March 1st. This new one-chapter story is illustrated by Daniel Allen, it features both Kaeans and Turikasuul, it's 27 pages long, and the cover looks like this:

-Jason