Free for All by Patrick Horvath - Comic Review
Blood, satire, and billionaires: a brutal one-shot that slices into wealth and power.
Sometimes I worry about Patrick.
I don’t actually know the guy, but his mind is a horror show—and I mean that as the highest compliment. I hope it stays that way for as long as he wants it to, because the stories he tells are nothing short of perfection.
I’m not sure how many comics he’s created beyond Beneath the Trees Where Nobody Sees and now Free for All, but honestly, this kind of quality over quantity is more impressive than a long list of hits and misses.
Free for All doesn’t quite fit into horror or mystery, but it definitely comes from a mind bursting with dark imagination. Unique stories are rare—and unique hack-and-slash stories? Even rarer.
Story
The premise is simple, and since this is a one-shot, the comic doesn’t waste time getting there. But really, the plot is just the setup—the spectacle is what you’re here for.
Set in a dystopian future, the World Finance League randomly selects billionaires and trillionaires and forces them to make a choice: either donate half their wealth to the public good… or defend it in a ritual death match.
Ted Brooks, a real estate tycoon with 22 victories under his belt, has kept his fortune by being ruthless. But now he’s forced to face his ex-wife, Luella Dominguez—a woman who’s been waiting, training, and preparing for this moment. But can she truly defeat the man who built an empire by any means necessary?
That’s the setup. What follows is 56 pages of savage, high-stakes combat: brutal fights, shattered bones, severed limbs, caved-in skulls. It’s visceral, relentless, and impossible to look away from.
I mean… I’m not a violent person. If someone honks at me in traffic, the most I’ll do is maybe flip the bird. But Free for All had me thinking… what if?
Art
If I didn’t have kids in the house, I’d already be printing posters from this comic. Since they’re too young to be reading my newsletter, I’ll just leave a visual sample instead.
Horvath’s artwork is a gritty, grimy delight—full of texture and tension. His panels carry a rough, chaotic energy, mixing grotesque realism with a darkly stylized flair. The fight scenes are brutal but choreographed with a kind of nightmarish elegance: improvised weapons, desperate movements, moments of violence that are almost balletic.
The color palette helps push that gruesome spectacle further—intense, often jarring, never dull. And while Free for All was mostly drawn between 2016 and 2019, prior to Beneath the Trees, you can still see Horvath’s knack for visual storytelling and his ability to make the absurd feel chillingly grounded.
There’s a satirical bite to every page, not just in the writing but in the way characters are drawn, the staging of each panel, and the brutal absurdity of a society that literally fights to hoard wealth.
Final Thoughts
Free for All is sharp, vicious, and wildly entertaining. It's a social critique wrapped in blood and satire, delivered by a creator who clearly knows how to wield both pen and blade. If you’re in the mood for a one-shot that’ll punch you in the face and then make you think about late-stage capitalism, this is the comic for you.