The Lab Press is one of the newest publishers on the comic book scene, and they've got quite the star-studded lineup for their debut graphic novel. Essentials is a new sci-fi adventure written by Black Sails star Luke Arnold and animator Chris "Doc" Wyatt.
With the crowdfunding campaign for Essentials live now, IGN can exclusively debut a preview of this new graphic novel. Check it out in the slideshow gallery below:
Essentials also features a very impressive lineup of artists, including DaNi (Sandman Universe: The Dreaming), Glenn Fabry (Preacher), Jason Howard (Transformers), Vince Locke (A History of Violence), Brendan McCarthy (Spider-Man: Fever), Andrea Mutti (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo), M.K. Perker (Air) and a cover by Bill Sienkiewicz (New Mutants). The book's colorists include Jordie Bellaire, Brad Simpson and Wesley Wong. The creative team also features letterer DC Hopkins of AndWorld Design and designer Emma Price.
Here's the official description for Essentials:
In Essentials, mathematician Harris Pax predicted the end of the world, but failed to prevent it. Now he’s living alone in a bunker and his niece’s favorite toys are starting to talk to him. The good news? He’s not the world’s sole survivor. The bad news? The other survivors are trapped in alternate realities — trapped in imagined worlds full of zombies, pterodactyls, and chaos. And now Harris Pax and an unlikely ally must travel the country on a quest to restore reality, save humanity, and defeat his new interdimensional nemesis: Snuggles.
“The great joy of writing Essentials is that when it comes to setting and genre, we can do anything we want," Arnold tells IGN. "Each stage of our heroes’ quest involves them entering the subjective reality of someone else. This “bubble reality” has been unconsciously formed from the mind of the person inside: a zombie apocalypse that has grown out of someone’s fear for their family’s protection, a mighty throne for a man being crushed by responsibility, and for a ravenous collector who’s disgusted by his own desires… well, you’ll want to see that one for yourself.”
“We visit such different realities in Essentials that the thought occurred to us, if each reality were presented by a different artist, not only would we get to work with a variety of cool people, but there’d be a very clear visual difference between the realities," says Wyatt. "We honestly didn’t think The Lab Press would go for it, because it creates a lot more work for them to coordinate all of those artists… but they’re crazy, so they agreed to it.”
Wyatt is keeping plenty busy these days thanks to his collectible company Wandering Planet Toys. IGN recently got an exclusive look at the second series of figures based on the classic sci-fi series The Prisoner.
In other comic book news, Josh Gad is making his comics debut with The Writer, and a copy of Action Comics #1 just became the most expensive comic ever.
Jesse is a mild-mannered staff writer for IGN. Allow him to lend a machete to your intellectual thicket by following @jschedeen on Twitter.
