Yesterday, The Lab Press debuted with the launch of the ambitious sci-fi graphic novel Essentials on Kickstarter to thunderous acclaim—and today, The Beat has an exclusive sneak peek at a particularly juicy scene. Co-written by Luke Arnold and Chris “Doc” Wyatt with art by DaNi, Glenn Fabry, Jason Howard, Vince Locke, Brendan McCarthy, Andrea Mutti, M.K. Perker, cover art by Bill Sienkiewicz, colors by Jordie Bellaire, Brad Simpson, and Wesley Wong, and lettered by DC Hopkins, Essentials is a post-apocalyptic tale with a twist.
The story follows mathematician Harris Pax, who failed to prevent the end of the world despite being able to predict it. He lives alone in a bunker and talks to his niece’s favorite toys. Luckily, he’s not the only survivor—but everyone else is in alternate realities where pterodactyls, zombies, and worse are around every corner. If Harris wants to fix reality and save the world, he has to team up with a surprising ally, traverse the country, and face his worse interdimensional nightmare: Snuggles.
“We knew we wanted to tell a story that would make the most of the medium, traversing different realities and dimensions, then into our characters’ inner worlds as they teeter at the edge of insanity,” Arnold said in a statement for The Beat. “We kept challenging ourselves as writers to go the most interesting direction possible, and then threw that gauntlet down to our artists, challenging them to depict ideas might not—at first—be easily imagined.”
One such artist is M.K. Perker, who said, “I read almost everything. When I received the script for Essentials, I didn’t read only the pages I was going to draw, I read the whole thing. I was so captivated with the story that with each chapter, I resented the fact that I’m not the artist on that chapter. I envied all the artists who were going to draw all those pages. All those different, strange, weird universes and all the characters who were trapped in and traveling through multiple realities. And it has been a treat for me to be escorting them in one of those layers of reality.”
“Working with M.K. is a dream come true,” said Wyatt. “When he was doing Air from Vertigo Comics with G. Willow Wilson, it was my favorite book every month. I would run to the shop to get it the day it was out. When The Lab Press asked us for a list of artists we’d want to work with, he was at the top of my list, but I never thought we’d get him. I couldn’t believe it when it came together. Getting each new page from him as they were done was a delight.”
Below, check out an exclusive preview of Perker’s art from Essentials.
Helmed by founder and CEO Nicholas Kalikow, EIC Dagen Walker, VP of business development Diane Richey, and CCO Mike Zagari, The Lab Press boasts a roster of comics heavy-hitters dedicated to creating stories that are bold, subversive, and experimental.
“We love human moments in unhinged worlds; tales that entertain while illuminating some experiential truth. As our first book to market, Essentials will capture readers with its wild sci-fi adventure themes and compelling characters,” said Walker in the book’s announcement.
“We’ve managed to assemble a staggeringly talented group of artists to explore these ideas with us, creating a story that traverses a post-apocalyptic reality, multiple subjective projections, an interdimensional collective consciousness, and the kaleidoscopic labyrinth of our own minds,” said Arnold. “We wanted to tell a story that could only be fully realized in this medium, and this incredible team has taken it beyond our wildest dreams.”
Wyatt added, “We’re proud to be working with The Lab Press, a company that has given us total creative freedom and total support, even when we say things like—‘Our vision is to switch between seven different artists on this book to do the different realities, and you have to coordinate everything.’ The Lab Press is all in. They make it happen.”
Essentials is now live on Kickstarter. For more about The Lab Press, visit thelabpress.com.
