#patrick crotty

From the Irish

Most terrible was our hero in battle blows:

hands without fingers, shorn heads and toes

were scattered. That day there flew and fell

from astonished victems eyebrow, bone and entrail,

like stars in the sky, like snowflakes, like nuts in May,

like a meadow of daisies, like butts from an ashtray.

Familiar things, you might brush against or tread

upon in the daily round, were glistening red

with the slaughter the hero caused, though he had gone.

I’m in love with Black Border Flowers ⊟ 

A sports anime but with competitive card games is exactly what I’ve dreamt about my entire life -- though I wanted something less like Yu-Gi-Oh, and more like What If Netrunner Was A Card Anime. Top table competitions just seem to translate so well as comics with exaggerated anime drama.

Patrick Crotty, who you might know for heading Peow (publisher of many fine comics), is fulfilling my dreams with Black Border Flowers, a “a sports-manga styled comic about competitive Magic,” available to read online for free!

“The story follows a cast of three main characters playing at a Modern Grand Prix in Honolulu. A brother and sister, both amateur magic players, and a Magic prodigy who has been inexplicably absent from the MTG scene are all dragged in to (due to some"’stuff’) a very dangerous high-stakes underground Magic tournament. Weird huh.”

There are only two chapters so far, but the artist will continue to the story if enough people show interest and support his efforts on Patreon. Backers will be able to help influence the story (e.g. "which cards and decks to play, sideboard options, which lines of play the characters should take"), access alternative pages, read behind-the-scenes posts, and more.

Even if you have little to no experience playing Magic the Gathering, you can get by fine with the comic and still enjoy the game’s matches. And if you do want to learn more, Patrick also put together one of the best introductions and illustrated guides on how to play the card game.

1. "Moebius Library: Gardens of Edena" by Moebius

I can’t believe this existed for so long and I’ve never seen it.  Every turn of the page brings something incredible.  It’s 350 pages and it never gets any weaker.  The architecture, the landscapes, the scale, the costume design, the plant life, he just never takes a shortcut.  Everyone says the Airtight Garage is the masterpiece so I assumed this would be inferior, but it’s hard to see how that’s so.

2. "Ladder" by C.F.

There was thin competition for best scroll comic this year. I think this will eventually be published somewhere else in non-scroll format and will work just as fine, but it was definitely a singular experience to roll this thing out across my floor in a physical simulcrum of the internet’s infinite canvas, albeit limited to a horizontal infinite.  The comic with various folks completely misunderstanding each other on and around a lake was funny, dark, and surprisingly substantive and I’m looking forward to more people reading it than those willing to order reciept paper comics off the internet.

3. "Highbone Theatre" by Joe Daly

It’s funny to see some of the same tendencies from “Dungeon Quest” show up in here.  For instance there are pages of the characters just moving around in “Dungeon Quest” that feel like an artifact of the RPG setting of the comic. But then there are similar sequences in here that are pages long where someone is just backing a car up to hook into a boat trailer that are just really deeply satisfying to look at.  This is a legitimate one-of-a-kind comic, 570 page in-depth character study that is funny, wildly inventive, and very rewarding to close reads.

4. "Internal Affairs (3)" by Patrick Crotty

This was the sleeper hit of the year for me. It has a disarming cuteness that masks it’s formal experimentation and surprising depth of character and emotion.

5. "Yazar & Arkadas" by Lale Westvind