Kickstarter: Back to the Asylum Playing Cards

It's been a long journey for Serbian artist Milan Colovic leading up to the launch of Back to the Asylum Playing Cards. The original Asylum Playing Cards by Altius Management were never delivered and Milan was never paid for his services. In what is the first consumer protection lawsuit involving crowdfunding, Washington State Attorney General filed a suit against Ed Nash of Altius Management. You can read more about this on Max Playing Card's comprehensive write-up on The Dark Side of Kickstarter.

Almost three years later, Milan has the opportunity to turn things around and make the Asylum deck a reality. He collaborated with Roman Kotiv of Noir Arts to bring Back to the Asylum Playing Cards onto Kickstarter. With less than four days remaining, the project is well above it's funding goal of $5k!

We asked Milan why he is still passionate about the Back to the Asylum deck,

It's hard to explain why I'm so passionate about Asylum. That's what Asylum is all about - passion. For me Asylum is not just deck of cards. Story about Asylum turned into a real saga. Into obsession with plot, twists, turnarounds - on cards and in real life, after all good and bad things Asylum came through. Asylum art screams: "Passion!", from every corner of every card. Playing cards are great medium to present the art to the world. But if you use it as a medium, you must use it wisely and treat it carefully, with full respect of traditionalism. 

As for the inspiration behind the designs. Milan continued,

I found a lot of inspiration for Asylum in some of the anthological movies and retro/cult cinematographic creations and characters, from golden era of horrors. In its way it is my tribute to the masters of the silver screen such as Vincent Price, Kathy Bates, Sir Anthony Hopkins, etc. Every character is hand drawn carefully and with care, through bunch of sketches until it wasn't embodied in all its glory.   

I spent so much time with characters of Asylum, that some of them almost become alive. They even "acting" differently in different editions of Asylum. If they were images on paper in first edition of Asylum, in second one (Back to the Asylum) they've got own life. We created a story. Movie plot, actually. Some of them arise against medical staff of Asylum, some developed different personality, we had to invite medical staff reinforcement for the second deck... It's a deck with a good reason for existence, and great firm story behind it.

Pledge starts from $11. Also, if you backed the original Asylum project, take advantage the exclusive Limited Insanity bundle. The Asylum Inmate deck produced for that tier will be strictly limited to the original backers.