Crows and ravens are truly ominous animals, just ask Edgar Alan Poe. It's with this motif we're put into David Crocker's Raven Menace comic book. It's a 48 page odyssey that shows a tragic turn of events for a guy named Mac, a scientist who is in charge of protecting the fragile ecosystem of the US Southwest desert around the Grand Canyon.

It wasn't until midway through the comic that a true 'story' starts taking shape: setting, character, action, result -that kind of thing.

And that's this comic's biggest flaw. David Crocker's intentions are clearly to show a character transforming from the living waking world to his nightmare fantasy world and drifting between the two. I understand that. What's unclear is the story that's being told because of it. Things do happen to Mac, and there's consequences to his actions for sure, but there's no connection the reader can rely on to follow him in his story. The Raven Menace is a comic that would've benefitted greatly by having an editor at the helm to knit the disparate parts together to guide the reader through the protagonist's quest.

This comic does have an atmospheric quality to it. Some of the panels are clearly imaginative and compelling. The Kickstarter page that helped fund this comic describes Mac as:

"a loner making a living as a wildlife biologist in the desert of the American Southwest. He has kept a dark secret from his friends for a lifetime: a roadside reaper won't let him die."

Perhaps in future installments of this story David can tie the narrative together a bit more tightly and show us more of this immortal figure of the highway.