In ‘Free For All,’ Patrick Horvath Offers A Modest Proposal: Billionaire Death Matches

Anyone ready to read about a future where billionaires have to fight to the death for our amusement in order to hold on to a share of their fortunes? If so, Patrick Horvath has you covered with the timely release of his new single-issue comic Free for All, out later this spring from Oni Press.

Horvath, an independent filmmaker by trade, made a splash with his debut series, Beneath the Trees Where Nobody Sees (IDW Publishing) in 2023. The oddly adorable serial killer thriller featuring a cast of anthropomorphic animals in a Norman Rockwell-ish small town struck the right weird tone in a weird year. Imagine if David Lynch made an animated film for Dreamworks and you’re on the right track.

According to IDW, Beneath the Trees sold more than 180,000 copies in single issue, reprints, and trade editions across channels, accomplishing the rare feat of having later issues outsell earlier ones as word spread about the series. It ended up getting an Eisner Award nomination for “Best New Series” in 2024.

Fresh off this unexpected success, Horvath decided to crowdfund the publication of an earlier work, Free for All, on Zoop. He quickly raised enough from fans to publish a special edition, leading to an offer from Oni Press to release it to the comic book market.

Free for All takes place in a future where billionaires are subject to a lottery in which the selected candidate can either give half their wealth in taxes or fight, gladiator style, against another billionaire in a death match. Considering the sense of entitlement, omnipotence and self-regard that most billionaires have, you can imagine where this is going. Now throw in a twist that the latest challenger is the incumbent champion’s former wife and business partner who started a new business and climbed back up to billionaire level just to get a crack at her ex. It’s easy to see why the story is a good fit for the iconoclastic Oni Press, which also publishes the resurrected EC horror and science fiction comics.

“The idea came to me in 2016 and I drew most of it in 2018 and 2019,” said Horvath in a recent phone interview, referencing another fraught moment in American politics that predated the recent “cage match” posturing between Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg and the high-profile divorces of billionaires like Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos. “I was channeling the frustrations that I felt and the turmoil our country was working through in terms of income inequality. It was done very much in a satirical style. I was looking at the downsides to a seeming utopia created under these circumstances. It’s very much in the vein of, say, Robocop.”

Fans expecting the polished art and storytelling of Beneath the Trees Where Nobody Sees may be in for a surprise, as Free for All is clearly the work of a much less experienced and confident cartoonist. “It was a personal project, created just as a way to show what I could do in terms of drawing and writing,” Horvath said. Only later did he develop the appealing painted art style and facility with pacing, backgrounds and composition that made Beneath the Trees such a surprise and delight.

Free for All does not fully realize the potential in its premise, as it is over and done in 56 pages, and focuses mainly on gory battle scenes and the conflict between the two characters rather than the worldbuilding. Luckily, there’s more than enough going on in the world outside the comic book pages to allow readers to fill in their own subtext.

“With everything going on, the whole Mangione [accused shooter of United Health CEO] situation, I couldn’t be more timely, and in a weird way, I could have anticipated that,” said Horvath. “It’s just another evolution of the same problem that’s not going away anytime soon.”

Horvath said he has no immediate plans to tell more stories in the world of Free for All as he is spending most of his time on the 6-issue sequel to Beneath the Trees, due out from IDW in the summer of 2025. “I’m definitely open to writing more [Free for All], but I need to see how much I can take on, whether I could work with an artist and that kind of thing. But it’s in my mind.”

There’s certainly more to say about the world that Horvath created, and it’s likely the next few years will provide plenty of motivation for readers interested in seeing more (fictional) billionaires pitted in death matches for fun and profit. If and when those later stories emerge, told in Horvath’s more highly-developed current style, the Free for All one-shot will probably feel like one of those pilot-preview clips produced as a template for better things to come.

Readers who missed the crowdfund will be able to see for themselves when the book comes out from Oni Press soon.