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Corvus
Corvus follows Daryn Dall, a twenty-something Black gamer who’s spent most of his life carrying the grief of losing both parents—and escaping into the digital worlds he loves. He’s a nerd, a loner, and one of the best players on Earth at Quest 4 War, the planet’s most competitive war-strategy shooter. Maybe too good. His skills have drawn attention far beyond anything human. When a secretive, grassroots intergalactic resistance identifies Daryn as a strategic prodigy, their sentient ship—CORVUS—abducts him and drafts him into a war he never asked for. Their enemy: The Mare, a terrifying alien species whose psychic abilities force entire populations to relive their worst traumas on an endless loop, driving civilizations to collapse. Their only goal is annihilation. Trapped light-years from home, Daryn must confront his own buried pain while learning to fight a threat capable of turning memories into weapons. As the galaxy’s last line of defense, he’ll have to decide whether he’s willing to rise to the role others see in him—or watch humanity fall.
128 pages, Paperback
Published March 24, 2026
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
April 5, 2026
This comic follows Daryn, a gamer whose skills attract the attention of a ship called CORVUS, which drafts him into an intergalactic war against an alien species that weaponizes memories and trauma.
I enjoyed the art style and the space setting of this comic. It was an entertaining read that I liked, though I didn't love it.
The space background was interesting, but the story itself didn't grab me as much. The plot felt rushed, and the characters fell a bit flat in this first installment.
I would have liked more information about the antagonists, since we don't get to know much about them.
Ultimately, I don't think I will continue reading this series.
Thank you Dead Sky Publishing and NetGalley for the advanced electronic review copy of thi book!
I enjoyed the art style and the space setting of this comic. It was an entertaining read that I liked, though I didn't love it.
The space background was interesting, but the story itself didn't grab me as much. The plot felt rushed, and the characters fell a bit flat in this first installment.
I would have liked more information about the antagonists, since we don't get to know much about them.
Ultimately, I don't think I will continue reading this series.
Thank you Dead Sky Publishing and NetGalley for the advanced electronic review copy of thi book!
March 13, 2026
A perfectly adequate sci-fi graphic novel! Thank you to NetGalley for the ARC.
The character designs were solid and differentiable. I particularly liked the Mare designs; love a creepy flesh being. Unfortunately, the writing left a lot to be desired. The characters all felt a little flat and underdeveloped. There were interesting bits in the characters (such as Daryn's past trauma, Kara's relationship with her father), but I just didn't think they were explored enough. Consequently, the plot fell a flat as well. It's fairly standard, so it needed a little sauce from the characters to make it really pop, but there was no sauce. Alas.
I'd be interested to see if anything further comes from this world, because I think the premise is fun enough, and there is space for further adventures in this setting.
The character designs were solid and differentiable. I particularly liked the Mare designs; love a creepy flesh being. Unfortunately, the writing left a lot to be desired. The characters all felt a little flat and underdeveloped. There were interesting bits in the characters (such as Daryn's past trauma, Kara's relationship with her father), but I just didn't think they were explored enough. Consequently, the plot fell a flat as well. It's fairly standard, so it needed a little sauce from the characters to make it really pop, but there was no sauce. Alas.
I'd be interested to see if anything further comes from this world, because I think the premise is fun enough, and there is space for further adventures in this setting.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
A Gamer Gets Drafted Into the End of the World – Why “Corvus” Feels Like “The Last Starfighter” Written in the Language of Panic
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | February 25th, 2026
“Corvus” opens like a dare, the kind you accept with your better judgment already half out the door. A screen boots. A signal pings. The book speaks in system prompts before it speaks in sentences, as if to warn you that language itself has become a user interface. “TRANSMITTING,” it announces in one of its early, cold-blooded pages, and you can feel the story sliding into place with the same eerie inevitability as an app you didn’t mean to download but can’t stop watching install.
Buddy Beaudoin’s premise is disarmingly legible: Daryn Dall, a young Black gamer in his twenties, has outlived both his parents and carries that fact like a second skeleton. He’s also one of the best players on Earth at “Quest 4 War,” a war-strategy shooter that is, at first, only a game, a place where control is clean and competence is measurable. That purity does not last. Daryn is abducted by an intergalactic resistance and drafted into a war against “The Mare,” a psychic species that annihilates planets by forcing whole populations to relive their worst memories on an endless loop.
If that sounds like a neat metaphor in search of a plot, “Corvus” quickly proves it has the opposite problem: too much plot for a metaphor this sharp to carry without cracking. The pleasure of the book is watching it refuse to let the metaphor stay tidy. The Mare’s technique isn’t merely “trauma,” vaguely gestured at in tasteful flashback. It’s a formal principle. It is the book’s grammar, its montage logic, its repetition and rupture. “Corvus” does not only depict psychic invasion. It stages it.
Beaudoin understands that modern catastrophe arrives as a feed, and his collaborators render that truth with brutal clarity. Pages flicker into breaking-news coverage. Locations hop like anxious thoughts: Tokyo, Copenhagen, Denton, Texas. Later, an endgame panel reads like a global schedule of dread, cities and times arranged with the clinical calm of a dispatch. Even when the text you’re reading is dialogue between frightened people, the experience is that of being inside a system that keeps updating without your consent. The book’s recurring UI pages – menus, readouts, transmission screens, status bars – are not clever decorations. They are the aesthetic equivalent of intrusive thought. They make the story feel less like a sequence of events than a machine that has begun running and will not stop.
This is why “Corvus” is at its best when it embraces the ugliness of being “online” in the broadest, most existential sense. Daryn’s skill at “Quest 4 War” is not treated as a cute geek credential. It’s a language he speaks fluently, a dialect of vigilance. When the resistance tries to explain why they chose him, the book doesn’t reach for a solemn speech. It shows him the “Quest 4 War” menu, the leaderboard. You can almost hear the unsaid accusation: you have been practicing for this your whole life, whether you meant to or not. In an era where a person’s habits are always legible to some algorithm, the sequence lands with an uncomfortable intimacy. Daryn is recruited the way people are targeted: because he is readable.
The comp titles are there if you want them. There is the skeleton of “The Last Starfighter” in the setup: the kid who excels at a game is pulled into a real war. There are “Aliens” notes in the tone – the sense of a scrappy crew confronting something both monstrous and systemic. But “Corvus” is less interested in homage than in contamination. It borrows familiar genre oxygen and then floods the room with fog.
That fog is literal, yes, but it is also the book’s master metaphor for consciousness under siege. “Enter the Fog,” one of the later section titles, feels less like an invitation than a diagnosis. A fog is what happens when the environment becomes unreliable, when the horizon disappears, when your own senses stop reporting honestly. That is what the Mare does. It doesn’t simply attack bodies. It attacks the conditions by which bodies understand themselves. At one point the story slips into a white void, the kind of blank space that in other comics might signal a dream. Here it signals something more violent: a forced edit. Labels appear like files or menu options: “FIRST KISS.” “ALONE!” An “EXIT” prompt hovers like a cruel joke. Daryn’s gamer brain reaches for the escape key, and the book makes the reader feel how deeply that reflex is wired – the belief that there is always a quit button somewhere if you can only find it.
The scenes that anchor Daryn are, tellingly, not the space battles. They are the moments when grief asserts itself like gravity. A gravestone – “RAYMOND DALLE 1973–2001” – is not a plot point so much as a thesis. The Mare doesn’t invent trauma; it exploits what is already there. When Daryn is confronted with a voice demanding, “What kind of son are you?,” the question is less about morality than about the peculiar, corrosive logic grief can take on when left to echo in an unguarded mind. The book is frank about this, and sometimes profane. It has the gall to let its characters speak the way people speak when the room is on fire: panicked, rude, funny in short bursts, then suddenly not funny at all. Beaudoin’s written DNA is not subtle – the snappy cadence, the defensive humor, the blunt “fuck you” of someone who has been cornered by forces too large to argue with politely. That language gives the book its pulse.
If “Corvus” were only Daryn’s story – the gamer learns he must become a warrior – it might end up as a competent genre ride with a few good trauma metaphors. What complicates it, and occasionally unbalances it, is the book’s insistence on widening the frame. We meet a larger crew, hinted at in names that arrive like a briefing rather than a slow introduction: Kara, Sig, Stryx, figures with mythic-sounding handles and the lived exhaustion of people who have already watched worlds fall. The book introduces the “Galactic Alliance” – an institutional counterweight to the grassroots resistance – and lands briefly on the familiar stage of bureaucracy: aid denied, sanctions invoked, a dismissal delivered with the chill of procedural authority. In “Corvus,” the monster isn’t only the Mare. It’s also a moral shrug rendered in official language.
That thread becomes increasingly contemporary as the story accelerates. The refusal scenes – the moments when the battered decide they can’t risk more, when grief becomes a border – resonate in an era of exhausted empathy and strategic inaction. “We grieve as you do,” a voice insists, and another responds, in effect, you cannot fathom my grief. It’s a brutal exchange, and a recognizable one, even off the page. The book understands that trauma doesn’t always produce solidarity. Sometimes it produces closure, isolation, an insistence that suffering grants the right to say no. That is not a flattering insight, but it is an honest one.
Visually, “Corvus” thrives on controlled chaos. The palette, as seen across the book’s broad movement, is disciplined in a way that makes its ruptures matter. Ship interiors and interface pages lean cold – blues, teals, sterile grays – while the Mare’s presence blooms in hot purples, magentas, bruised reds, and sickly greens that feel less like colors than symptoms. When the book cuts to breaking-news panels, it adopts the brittle, high-contrast clarity of broadcast graphics. When it plunges into Mare-space, it dissolves into voids and fog and jagged montage. The effect is not merely stylish. It’s thematic: reality becomes legible when it is mediated, and terrifying when it is not.
The strongest formal achievement of “Corvus” is its ability to make you feel the violence of being forced to relive. In prose, repetition can be numbing. In comics, repetition becomes architecture. A face reappears in different angles. A phrase returns in a slightly altered balloon. A label sits on top of a scene like an index card pinned to a wound. The reader experiences a kind of cognitive claustrophobia, the sense that the story is circling the same drain on purpose. This is precisely what the Mare does, and it is precisely what the book needs to do if its villain is to be more than a monster-of-the-week with a clever hook.
Still, the book’s ambition creates its own friction. “Corvus” is propelled by the momentum of serialization, and you can feel, at times, the brisk necessity of moving from set piece to set piece. The ensemble is intriguing, but not always given the room to become fully inhabited on the page. Politics enters, flares, then gives way to action. Certain emotional beats – particularly those involving secondary characters’ parental wounds, suggested by the section title “Daddy’s Girl” and by repeated cries of “Dad!” – land more as thematic rhymes than as fully articulated arcs. The book is rich in signals; it is occasionally stingy with stillness.
And yet the propulsion is also the book’s charm. Beaudoin has a particular gift for the scene that turns on a dime: banter to horror, competence to panic, a joke to a confession. Daryn’s arc – from a young man who believes the only safe world is a game to someone who begins, reluctantly, to accept that real survival requires other people – is not reinventing narrative, but it is executed with an emotional directness that keeps it from feeling generic. When a character thanks Daryn “for everything,” it lands not as a tidy moral but as a hard-earned moment of belonging, the kind you only get after you’ve failed publicly and survived anyway.
One of the slyer accomplishments of “Corvus” is that it treats contemporary systems as both setting and style. The Mare creates fog – confusion, mental overload, the collapse of coherent narrative – and humans respond the way they do now: with dashboards. With schedules. With strikes. With a list of cities and times that reads like a calendar invite for annihilation. The book’s climax, in this sense, is not only about defeating a villain; it’s about confronting the horrifying ease with which suffering becomes logistics. Daryn’s war is psychic, but the world’s response is infrastructural. It is an ugly, plausible symmetry.
If you squint, you can see why this story belongs to our moment: the sense that everyone is living inside a loop of alerts, a feed of dread; the suspicion that institutions will be late, if they arrive at all; the knowledge that private pain is never fully private when systems can weaponize what they know about you. “Corvus” doesn’t preach those ideas. It builds a machine that enacts them.
The afterword – tender, grateful, and haunted – reframes the whole book as an act of conversion. Nightmares, Beaudoin suggests, are not only endured. They can be shaped, shared, externalized into narrative where they become something other than solitary punishment. That is, finally, what “Corvus” is selling: not the fantasy of victory, but the possibility that what traps you in your own head can be confronted if it is named, mapped, and fought – not alone, but with others who understand that survival is not a solo mode.
“Corvus” is not a perfect book, and it doesn’t pretend to be. Its edges show. Its pace sometimes outstrips its intimacy. But its best pages are formally inventive in a way that feels native to comics rather than borrowed from film, and its central metaphor is not only timely but frighteningly durable: the enemy that kills you by making you live the worst part again.
For a story that begins in a menu screen and ends with “End of Series One,” it leaves a surprising residue: less the buzz of a completed adventure than the ache of recognizing, uncomfortably, how familiar the fog already is. 84/100.
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | February 25th, 2026
“Corvus” opens like a dare, the kind you accept with your better judgment already half out the door. A screen boots. A signal pings. The book speaks in system prompts before it speaks in sentences, as if to warn you that language itself has become a user interface. “TRANSMITTING,” it announces in one of its early, cold-blooded pages, and you can feel the story sliding into place with the same eerie inevitability as an app you didn’t mean to download but can’t stop watching install.
Buddy Beaudoin’s premise is disarmingly legible: Daryn Dall, a young Black gamer in his twenties, has outlived both his parents and carries that fact like a second skeleton. He’s also one of the best players on Earth at “Quest 4 War,” a war-strategy shooter that is, at first, only a game, a place where control is clean and competence is measurable. That purity does not last. Daryn is abducted by an intergalactic resistance and drafted into a war against “The Mare,” a psychic species that annihilates planets by forcing whole populations to relive their worst memories on an endless loop.
If that sounds like a neat metaphor in search of a plot, “Corvus” quickly proves it has the opposite problem: too much plot for a metaphor this sharp to carry without cracking. The pleasure of the book is watching it refuse to let the metaphor stay tidy. The Mare’s technique isn’t merely “trauma,” vaguely gestured at in tasteful flashback. It’s a formal principle. It is the book’s grammar, its montage logic, its repetition and rupture. “Corvus” does not only depict psychic invasion. It stages it.
Beaudoin understands that modern catastrophe arrives as a feed, and his collaborators render that truth with brutal clarity. Pages flicker into breaking-news coverage. Locations hop like anxious thoughts: Tokyo, Copenhagen, Denton, Texas. Later, an endgame panel reads like a global schedule of dread, cities and times arranged with the clinical calm of a dispatch. Even when the text you’re reading is dialogue between frightened people, the experience is that of being inside a system that keeps updating without your consent. The book’s recurring UI pages – menus, readouts, transmission screens, status bars – are not clever decorations. They are the aesthetic equivalent of intrusive thought. They make the story feel less like a sequence of events than a machine that has begun running and will not stop.
This is why “Corvus” is at its best when it embraces the ugliness of being “online” in the broadest, most existential sense. Daryn’s skill at “Quest 4 War” is not treated as a cute geek credential. It’s a language he speaks fluently, a dialect of vigilance. When the resistance tries to explain why they chose him, the book doesn’t reach for a solemn speech. It shows him the “Quest 4 War” menu, the leaderboard. You can almost hear the unsaid accusation: you have been practicing for this your whole life, whether you meant to or not. In an era where a person’s habits are always legible to some algorithm, the sequence lands with an uncomfortable intimacy. Daryn is recruited the way people are targeted: because he is readable.
The comp titles are there if you want them. There is the skeleton of “The Last Starfighter” in the setup: the kid who excels at a game is pulled into a real war. There are “Aliens” notes in the tone – the sense of a scrappy crew confronting something both monstrous and systemic. But “Corvus” is less interested in homage than in contamination. It borrows familiar genre oxygen and then floods the room with fog.
That fog is literal, yes, but it is also the book’s master metaphor for consciousness under siege. “Enter the Fog,” one of the later section titles, feels less like an invitation than a diagnosis. A fog is what happens when the environment becomes unreliable, when the horizon disappears, when your own senses stop reporting honestly. That is what the Mare does. It doesn’t simply attack bodies. It attacks the conditions by which bodies understand themselves. At one point the story slips into a white void, the kind of blank space that in other comics might signal a dream. Here it signals something more violent: a forced edit. Labels appear like files or menu options: “FIRST KISS.” “ALONE!” An “EXIT” prompt hovers like a cruel joke. Daryn’s gamer brain reaches for the escape key, and the book makes the reader feel how deeply that reflex is wired – the belief that there is always a quit button somewhere if you can only find it.
The scenes that anchor Daryn are, tellingly, not the space battles. They are the moments when grief asserts itself like gravity. A gravestone – “RAYMOND DALLE 1973–2001” – is not a plot point so much as a thesis. The Mare doesn’t invent trauma; it exploits what is already there. When Daryn is confronted with a voice demanding, “What kind of son are you?,” the question is less about morality than about the peculiar, corrosive logic grief can take on when left to echo in an unguarded mind. The book is frank about this, and sometimes profane. It has the gall to let its characters speak the way people speak when the room is on fire: panicked, rude, funny in short bursts, then suddenly not funny at all. Beaudoin’s written DNA is not subtle – the snappy cadence, the defensive humor, the blunt “fuck you” of someone who has been cornered by forces too large to argue with politely. That language gives the book its pulse.
If “Corvus” were only Daryn’s story – the gamer learns he must become a warrior – it might end up as a competent genre ride with a few good trauma metaphors. What complicates it, and occasionally unbalances it, is the book’s insistence on widening the frame. We meet a larger crew, hinted at in names that arrive like a briefing rather than a slow introduction: Kara, Sig, Stryx, figures with mythic-sounding handles and the lived exhaustion of people who have already watched worlds fall. The book introduces the “Galactic Alliance” – an institutional counterweight to the grassroots resistance – and lands briefly on the familiar stage of bureaucracy: aid denied, sanctions invoked, a dismissal delivered with the chill of procedural authority. In “Corvus,” the monster isn’t only the Mare. It’s also a moral shrug rendered in official language.
That thread becomes increasingly contemporary as the story accelerates. The refusal scenes – the moments when the battered decide they can’t risk more, when grief becomes a border – resonate in an era of exhausted empathy and strategic inaction. “We grieve as you do,” a voice insists, and another responds, in effect, you cannot fathom my grief. It’s a brutal exchange, and a recognizable one, even off the page. The book understands that trauma doesn’t always produce solidarity. Sometimes it produces closure, isolation, an insistence that suffering grants the right to say no. That is not a flattering insight, but it is an honest one.
Visually, “Corvus” thrives on controlled chaos. The palette, as seen across the book’s broad movement, is disciplined in a way that makes its ruptures matter. Ship interiors and interface pages lean cold – blues, teals, sterile grays – while the Mare’s presence blooms in hot purples, magentas, bruised reds, and sickly greens that feel less like colors than symptoms. When the book cuts to breaking-news panels, it adopts the brittle, high-contrast clarity of broadcast graphics. When it plunges into Mare-space, it dissolves into voids and fog and jagged montage. The effect is not merely stylish. It’s thematic: reality becomes legible when it is mediated, and terrifying when it is not.
The strongest formal achievement of “Corvus” is its ability to make you feel the violence of being forced to relive. In prose, repetition can be numbing. In comics, repetition becomes architecture. A face reappears in different angles. A phrase returns in a slightly altered balloon. A label sits on top of a scene like an index card pinned to a wound. The reader experiences a kind of cognitive claustrophobia, the sense that the story is circling the same drain on purpose. This is precisely what the Mare does, and it is precisely what the book needs to do if its villain is to be more than a monster-of-the-week with a clever hook.
Still, the book’s ambition creates its own friction. “Corvus” is propelled by the momentum of serialization, and you can feel, at times, the brisk necessity of moving from set piece to set piece. The ensemble is intriguing, but not always given the room to become fully inhabited on the page. Politics enters, flares, then gives way to action. Certain emotional beats – particularly those involving secondary characters’ parental wounds, suggested by the section title “Daddy’s Girl” and by repeated cries of “Dad!” – land more as thematic rhymes than as fully articulated arcs. The book is rich in signals; it is occasionally stingy with stillness.
And yet the propulsion is also the book’s charm. Beaudoin has a particular gift for the scene that turns on a dime: banter to horror, competence to panic, a joke to a confession. Daryn’s arc – from a young man who believes the only safe world is a game to someone who begins, reluctantly, to accept that real survival requires other people – is not reinventing narrative, but it is executed with an emotional directness that keeps it from feeling generic. When a character thanks Daryn “for everything,” it lands not as a tidy moral but as a hard-earned moment of belonging, the kind you only get after you’ve failed publicly and survived anyway.
One of the slyer accomplishments of “Corvus” is that it treats contemporary systems as both setting and style. The Mare creates fog – confusion, mental overload, the collapse of coherent narrative – and humans respond the way they do now: with dashboards. With schedules. With strikes. With a list of cities and times that reads like a calendar invite for annihilation. The book’s climax, in this sense, is not only about defeating a villain; it’s about confronting the horrifying ease with which suffering becomes logistics. Daryn’s war is psychic, but the world’s response is infrastructural. It is an ugly, plausible symmetry.
If you squint, you can see why this story belongs to our moment: the sense that everyone is living inside a loop of alerts, a feed of dread; the suspicion that institutions will be late, if they arrive at all; the knowledge that private pain is never fully private when systems can weaponize what they know about you. “Corvus” doesn’t preach those ideas. It builds a machine that enacts them.
The afterword – tender, grateful, and haunted – reframes the whole book as an act of conversion. Nightmares, Beaudoin suggests, are not only endured. They can be shaped, shared, externalized into narrative where they become something other than solitary punishment. That is, finally, what “Corvus” is selling: not the fantasy of victory, but the possibility that what traps you in your own head can be confronted if it is named, mapped, and fought – not alone, but with others who understand that survival is not a solo mode.
“Corvus” is not a perfect book, and it doesn’t pretend to be. Its edges show. Its pace sometimes outstrips its intimacy. But its best pages are formally inventive in a way that feels native to comics rather than borrowed from film, and its central metaphor is not only timely but frighteningly durable: the enemy that kills you by making you live the worst part again.
For a story that begins in a menu screen and ends with “End of Series One,” it leaves a surprising residue: less the buzz of a completed adventure than the ache of recognizing, uncomfortably, how familiar the fog already is. 84/100.
March 24, 2026
A war shooter, but the final boss is your childhood.
BWAF Score: 6/10
TL;DR: Corvus is sci-fi horror that treats grief like a targeting system: the better you are at surviving, the more efficiently the universe recruits you into hell. It is a propulsive, HUD-haunted nightmare, mixing crisp action readability with psychic dread, and it’s best for readers who want trauma-as-monster storytelling without sacrificing momentum, gore, and spectacle.
The best argument Corvus makes is not in its lore, or its gamer-to-space-soldier hook, or even the “Germanic folklore” preface about The Mare squatting on your chest and gifting you nightmare fuel. The best argument is visual: this book wants to feel like being yanked out of your bedroom by the collar and shoved into a glowing, cold interface where your trauma is now a tactical objective. It leans hard into screens, overlays, HUD framing, and that videogame-adjacent language of download bars and targeting reticles, then uses it as a pressure chamber. You are not just reading panels. You are being transmitted.
That framing does a lot of heavy lifting, because the premise is clean and pulp-forward in a way I mean as a compliment. Daryn Dall is a young man in his twenties, crushed by having outlived both parents, and he’s also extremely good at a war shooter called Quest 4 War. His skill gets him noticed by a grassroots intergalactic resistance operating a ship called CORVUS, and they recruit him unwillingly to help stop an alien race known as The Mare. The Mare are described as the truest evil in the galaxy, using psychic power to force people to relive their worst trauma on a loop until civilizations collapse.
What makes this land as solid instead of skating into “cool pitch, average execution” is how often the comic remembers it is a comic. Paneling and pacing do the most work in the early movement: wide space shots and modular, angled insets create that kinetic, tactical rhythm, then the book snaps into tighter beats when it wants you trapped with Daryn. You get decompressed pauses where the scene breathes and dread seeps in, then sudden compression when something violent happens and the page wants to shove your face into it. A moment reads as banter or routine, then the next page or the next panel cadence pivots the temperature fast, the way a nightmare does when it stops pretending to be metaphor.
Readability and staging are mostly strong, especially when the book is doing movement across space: ships in chaos, bodies in motion, characters hustling through interiors. The action generally tracks, and the facial acting helps keep the emotional thread from getting lost in the sci-fi machinery. Daryn’s expressions do a lot of “I’m trying to be rational while my brain is screaming,” which is basically the house style of this story. Body language also gets used to show power dynamics without needing paragraphs of dialogue: who leans in, who blocks a doorway, who is framed as small against a huge environment. That matters, because Corvus is constantly telling you that consent is a funny little concept once you are in the hands of bigger forces.
Color and ink choices do a ton of mood work. There’s a push-pull between crisp, high-contrast sci-fi surfaces and moments where the palette gets meaner, dirtier, more nightmare-smeared. Space and tech are rendered with clean gradients and controlled lighting, while Mare-adjacent moments drift toward harsher contrast and less comforting texture. Negative space gets used as a threat: big black fields, isolated figures, a sense that the frame itself could swallow you. Even when the linework stays relatively clean, the atmosphere says: you are not safe in the clean room either.
Horror is where the book is most uneven but still effective. When it stages violence, it often does it with a quick escalation and a clear focal point, so you feel the shock without losing the geography of the scene. When it withholds, it leans into implication, shadow, and the wrongness of bodies and shapes rather than lingering on gore. The strongest horror beats are the ones that treat trauma like a monster with habits: it returns, it repeats, it adapts, it learns your schedule. The Mare concept is brutal because it’s not just “boo, scary alien.” It’s “your worst memory is now an environment you can’t leave.” That’s pretty fucked, and the comic knows it.
Dread mechanics here are basically three engines firing at once. One, captivity: Daryn is recruited unwillingly, so even the “good guys” carry menace. Two, competence as vulnerability: his skill at a war game becomes a chain, and the book keeps twisting that screw. Three, the trauma loop idea, which turns internal suffering into an external antagonist. The tension comes from anticipation more than mystery. You understand early that the Mare don’t just kill you, they make you live through something again and again until you break, and that knowledge contaminates every quieter scene.
Corvus is largely about grief, agency, and the way survival can become a job you never applied for. Daryn’s backstory is presented as a weight he carries daily, and the cosmic stakes do not erase that. If anything, the story keeps insisting that the galaxy-ending threat and the personal spiral are the same kind of problem, just scaled differently. The Mare are an embodiment of that: an enemy that weaponizes what already lives inside you.
For me, the biggest wobble is that the comic sometimes wants to be breezy action-sci-fi and heavy psychological horror in the same breath, and the seam shows. Some transitions hit like a clean smash cut, others feel like the book changed gears without fully conceptualizing the clutch. A few emotional beats could have used one more silent panel, one more held expression, one more breath before the plot sprints again. When it slows down and trusts the page, it’s genuinely compelling. When it rushes, the big ideas are still there, but they feel more like a mission briefing than a gut punch.
If you like propulsive sci-fi with horror venom in its fangs, and you enjoy stories where the power fantasy of being good at a game gets inverted into a trap, you are going to have a good time. If you are already allergic to any whiff of gamer-adjacent setup, you might bounce early even though the book is doing more interesting emotional work than the premise suggests. But if you stick with it, the comic proves it is not just cosplay armor and laser fire. It wants to dig into the bad dreams and make them tactical, which is a pretty effective pitch.
Read if you like “video game skills become a curse” setups, where competence is just a nicer word for being useful to terrifying people.
Skip if you don’t like tonal blends where action-sci-fi and psychological horror share the same page and occasionally show the seam.
BWAF Score: 6/10
TL;DR: Corvus is sci-fi horror that treats grief like a targeting system: the better you are at surviving, the more efficiently the universe recruits you into hell. It is a propulsive, HUD-haunted nightmare, mixing crisp action readability with psychic dread, and it’s best for readers who want trauma-as-monster storytelling without sacrificing momentum, gore, and spectacle.
The best argument Corvus makes is not in its lore, or its gamer-to-space-soldier hook, or even the “Germanic folklore” preface about The Mare squatting on your chest and gifting you nightmare fuel. The best argument is visual: this book wants to feel like being yanked out of your bedroom by the collar and shoved into a glowing, cold interface where your trauma is now a tactical objective. It leans hard into screens, overlays, HUD framing, and that videogame-adjacent language of download bars and targeting reticles, then uses it as a pressure chamber. You are not just reading panels. You are being transmitted.
That framing does a lot of heavy lifting, because the premise is clean and pulp-forward in a way I mean as a compliment. Daryn Dall is a young man in his twenties, crushed by having outlived both parents, and he’s also extremely good at a war shooter called Quest 4 War. His skill gets him noticed by a grassroots intergalactic resistance operating a ship called CORVUS, and they recruit him unwillingly to help stop an alien race known as The Mare. The Mare are described as the truest evil in the galaxy, using psychic power to force people to relive their worst trauma on a loop until civilizations collapse.
What makes this land as solid instead of skating into “cool pitch, average execution” is how often the comic remembers it is a comic. Paneling and pacing do the most work in the early movement: wide space shots and modular, angled insets create that kinetic, tactical rhythm, then the book snaps into tighter beats when it wants you trapped with Daryn. You get decompressed pauses where the scene breathes and dread seeps in, then sudden compression when something violent happens and the page wants to shove your face into it. A moment reads as banter or routine, then the next page or the next panel cadence pivots the temperature fast, the way a nightmare does when it stops pretending to be metaphor.
Readability and staging are mostly strong, especially when the book is doing movement across space: ships in chaos, bodies in motion, characters hustling through interiors. The action generally tracks, and the facial acting helps keep the emotional thread from getting lost in the sci-fi machinery. Daryn’s expressions do a lot of “I’m trying to be rational while my brain is screaming,” which is basically the house style of this story. Body language also gets used to show power dynamics without needing paragraphs of dialogue: who leans in, who blocks a doorway, who is framed as small against a huge environment. That matters, because Corvus is constantly telling you that consent is a funny little concept once you are in the hands of bigger forces.
Color and ink choices do a ton of mood work. There’s a push-pull between crisp, high-contrast sci-fi surfaces and moments where the palette gets meaner, dirtier, more nightmare-smeared. Space and tech are rendered with clean gradients and controlled lighting, while Mare-adjacent moments drift toward harsher contrast and less comforting texture. Negative space gets used as a threat: big black fields, isolated figures, a sense that the frame itself could swallow you. Even when the linework stays relatively clean, the atmosphere says: you are not safe in the clean room either.
Horror is where the book is most uneven but still effective. When it stages violence, it often does it with a quick escalation and a clear focal point, so you feel the shock without losing the geography of the scene. When it withholds, it leans into implication, shadow, and the wrongness of bodies and shapes rather than lingering on gore. The strongest horror beats are the ones that treat trauma like a monster with habits: it returns, it repeats, it adapts, it learns your schedule. The Mare concept is brutal because it’s not just “boo, scary alien.” It’s “your worst memory is now an environment you can’t leave.” That’s pretty fucked, and the comic knows it.
Dread mechanics here are basically three engines firing at once. One, captivity: Daryn is recruited unwillingly, so even the “good guys” carry menace. Two, competence as vulnerability: his skill at a war game becomes a chain, and the book keeps twisting that screw. Three, the trauma loop idea, which turns internal suffering into an external antagonist. The tension comes from anticipation more than mystery. You understand early that the Mare don’t just kill you, they make you live through something again and again until you break, and that knowledge contaminates every quieter scene.
Corvus is largely about grief, agency, and the way survival can become a job you never applied for. Daryn’s backstory is presented as a weight he carries daily, and the cosmic stakes do not erase that. If anything, the story keeps insisting that the galaxy-ending threat and the personal spiral are the same kind of problem, just scaled differently. The Mare are an embodiment of that: an enemy that weaponizes what already lives inside you.
For me, the biggest wobble is that the comic sometimes wants to be breezy action-sci-fi and heavy psychological horror in the same breath, and the seam shows. Some transitions hit like a clean smash cut, others feel like the book changed gears without fully conceptualizing the clutch. A few emotional beats could have used one more silent panel, one more held expression, one more breath before the plot sprints again. When it slows down and trusts the page, it’s genuinely compelling. When it rushes, the big ideas are still there, but they feel more like a mission briefing than a gut punch.
If you like propulsive sci-fi with horror venom in its fangs, and you enjoy stories where the power fantasy of being good at a game gets inverted into a trap, you are going to have a good time. If you are already allergic to any whiff of gamer-adjacent setup, you might bounce early even though the book is doing more interesting emotional work than the premise suggests. But if you stick with it, the comic proves it is not just cosplay armor and laser fire. It wants to dig into the bad dreams and make them tactical, which is a pretty effective pitch.
Read if you like “video game skills become a curse” setups, where competence is just a nicer word for being useful to terrifying people.
Skip if you don’t like tonal blends where action-sci-fi and psychological horror share the same page and occasionally show the seam.
April 12, 2026
Reasonable, if slightly disposable, sci-fi actioner. Our lead is suddenly the world's third-best at a new computer game, bought courtesy the humdrum video game store job he has. But when demonic alien things come along and slaughter his colleague, he's rushed into space by the world's best and second-best players at it, two feisty femmes in charge of a piddly little resistance ship, tasking themselves with the ending of the demonic alien things. If our guy can get our head around his unwillingness to join in with the scenario, Earth has a chance. A very slight one, though...
This was OK entertainment for a short while, and little else. The characters have uneven arcs, hating on each other, then supporting each other, then back again, and clearly we've avoided a training montage or two as our guy goes from reluctant space warrior to being full of allegedly useful lingo, unless the game fed to Earth from beyond really taught him enough. Things are jumpy here, to say the least – and add to that the fact that the art that can be quite poor when it's most important, and that one element of the conclusion is desperately obvious, and you might think this is not worth your while. But like I say, for light drama it serves its purpose. Come to this knowing it's as shallow as a puddle the dimensions of a CD and you'll be OK with it; think to get more and you'll be after a refund. Three and a half, slightly generous, stars.
This was OK entertainment for a short while, and little else. The characters have uneven arcs, hating on each other, then supporting each other, then back again, and clearly we've avoided a training montage or two as our guy goes from reluctant space warrior to being full of allegedly useful lingo, unless the game fed to Earth from beyond really taught him enough. Things are jumpy here, to say the least – and add to that the fact that the art that can be quite poor when it's most important, and that one element of the conclusion is desperately obvious, and you might think this is not worth your while. But like I say, for light drama it serves its purpose. Come to this knowing it's as shallow as a puddle the dimensions of a CD and you'll be OK with it; think to get more and you'll be after a refund. Three and a half, slightly generous, stars.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
Welp. This is definitely a graphic novel.
Have you ever had anyone ask you to review something they have done, but they start out by almost making you feel guilty if you actually critique it by what they say before you review it? That’s how this starts out. The introduction talks about the work and almost sets you up to feel guilty if you have issues with it. Fortunately for me, I’m a teacher and have no feelings and thrive off of killing people’s hopes and dreams. Kidding.
The positive is the artwork is good.
Everything else about it goes downhill from there. The story isn’t great and has been done before and done better.
It did feel like the author wanted to make sure you knew every cussword that they have ever heard or learned. Like I said, I teach school. Been there, done that. Doesn’t offend me. It just didn’t serve a purpose. There is also a “nightmare” of one character that deals with their sexuality that felt like the same thing. Almost like, “Look at me! I’m edgy.” Nope. Didn’t add depth to the character. Didn’t really add to the background of the character. It just felt like lazy writing.
I received this ARC from NetGalley and the publisher in exchange for an unbiased review.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
Think Galaxy Quest, or the Last Star Fighter, but instead of a slick and sleek space force … it’s three people fighting for the sake of the galaxy grabbing our poor hero along to be their fourth, because he’s really good at a computer game. Unfortunately, that aspect doesn’t really show up until the end, which is a shame. He’s supposed to be a strategic prodigy, but there’s only really one scene near the end that shows that off. The rest is just a heist and a road trip.
Storywise, it’s … okay.While, for me, the idea is better than the execution, I still enjoyed my time reading this comic that I’d pick up additional stories in this world. Thank you to Net Galley and the publisher for the ARC.
Storywise, it’s … okay.While, for me, the idea is better than the execution, I still enjoyed my time reading this comic that I’d pick up additional stories in this world. Thank you to Net Galley and the publisher for the ARC.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
3.75/5 rating: This one was fun! I'm a huge nerd and really appreciated the premise of a like-minded person being thrust into what can only be described as an impossible situation. As much as I love my video games and fantasy worlds, I probably wouldn't want to suddenly find out that some of it could be real. Art panels were great. The pacing felt a little off, with not enough story to really get me to connect to all the characters just yet. The "big battle" towards the end felt a little anticlimactic, honestly. Overall, I like the premise and I'm looking forward to seeing where the rest of the series goes.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
This was a fun little read. It was super quick and I really liked the art. I did struggle a little bit at the beginning though. I was pretty lost, and if I hadn’t read the synopsis, I probably wouldn’t have ,madeit past the first few pages. I feel like one or two additional panels would have been good to ground me a bit more in the story so I was just flopping around. The team members worked really well together, especially the core three. It was a pretty interesting story and I would continue to read future volumes.
Huge thanks to Dead Sky Publishing and NetGalley for sending me this ARC for review! All of my reviews are given honestly!
Huge thanks to Dead Sky Publishing and NetGalley for sending me this ARC for review! All of my reviews are given honestly!
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
“Now I find myself going out at night just to scream at the stars.”
Such a cool graphic novel and the art was rad!!
This surprised me, I didn’t expect to love this so much. The characters were so real and relatable.
Panel 87? OOF-
Daryn… The emotion was soooo felt.
And I love how they were all recruited lol!!
If you like Guardians of The Galaxy, this is so that vibe. Although, I was kind of disappointed by the Allegiance being all human or human presenting lol.
I can’t say I disagree w/ the General, but putting what’s right in spite should always be priority.
So 🫡 to Queen Huang and Sig!! Baddies fr.
I can’t wait for the next novel to drop 🫶🏽
Such a cool graphic novel and the art was rad!!
This surprised me, I didn’t expect to love this so much. The characters were so real and relatable.
Panel 87? OOF-
Daryn… The emotion was soooo felt.
And I love how they were all recruited lol!!
If you like Guardians of The Galaxy, this is so that vibe. Although, I was kind of disappointed by the Allegiance being all human or human presenting lol.
I can’t say I disagree w/ the General, but putting what’s right in spite should always be priority.
So 🫡 to Queen Huang and Sig!! Baddies fr.
I can’t wait for the next novel to drop 🫶🏽
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
Thanks Netgalley and publisher for allowing me to read this graphic novel.
Story seems alright enough although not spectacular as it’s been done a million times before even though I do appreciate the 3 main characters being a team to kick some alien azz. Also I hate the fact the artwork changed all of a sudden half way without notice like what was wrong with it in the first place?!
Overall it’s okish if you want to waste time on but there’s major room for Improvements with this story especially again the art side of things….
Story seems alright enough although not spectacular as it’s been done a million times before even though I do appreciate the 3 main characters being a team to kick some alien azz. Also I hate the fact the artwork changed all of a sudden half way without notice like what was wrong with it in the first place?!
Overall it’s okish if you want to waste time on but there’s major room for Improvements with this story especially again the art side of things….
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
Daryn works at Game Space and obsessively plays games. A ship named Corvus beams him aboard to assist in their fight with a different species called The Mare. They are pure evil and screw with your head. He must overcome his own personal battles that The Mare reminds him of and help find a way to defeat this evil intergalactic species.
I feel like it was a bit rushed, but overall it was an enjoyable read with interesting characters and plotline.
#ThxNetGalley #BuddyBeaudoin #Corvus
I feel like it was a bit rushed, but overall it was an enjoyable read with interesting characters and plotline.
#ThxNetGalley #BuddyBeaudoin #Corvus
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
Thanks again to the creative team for providing me this eARC in exchange for an honest review. Excellent story about sci-fi horror, my favorite since I saw Alien in the movie theater back in 1979. Art was wonderful, great dialogue and the engrossing storyline was top-notch. Where's the sequel? Highly recommended.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
I recieved an ARC of this book thanks to NetGalley and Dead Sky Publishing.
This was a fun storyline, but I felt like alot of the story was missing. It was a classic plot, with a lot of build-up, but the ending was rather anti-climatic and the story seemed to focus more on the bickering between all the characters than the actual plot.
This was a fun storyline, but I felt like alot of the story was missing. It was a classic plot, with a lot of build-up, but the ending was rather anti-climatic and the story seemed to focus more on the bickering between all the characters than the actual plot.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
Great read!!! The storyline was great!! Who would have thought that the game he played become real. I love it that he found his purpose and joined the group for more journey. The cliffhanger at the end was just right. It gave curiosity to know who hand is touching his work ID card. Great read!!
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Thank you to the publisher and netgalley for giving me the chance to read this book in advance~
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Thank you to the publisher and netgalley for giving me the chance to read this book in advance~
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
Pretty much your standard aliens attack earth story. This one does a lot in its 6 issues so the pacing can feel uneven and a lot of things are left unexplained. Still it's not bad. And kudos to Letterer, Buddy Beaudoin, for writing his first comic.
April 2, 2026
I was given a copy in exchange for an honest review. I appreciated the plot, characters, and LGBTQ+ representation. There are a lot of emotional plot lines put into a small space here. I hope there is more to come.
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