Crave #1 Advance Review: Maria Llovet’s Sexy Sci-Fi Series Is Remarkably Prescient

Maria Llovet strikes out on her own, writing and drawing the sexually charged new Image Comics book Crave #1.

We reviewed the book on the Stack podcast. But in the interest of highlighting more about the title, here’s a summary of the conversation with our thoughts. And if you prefer the longer audio version, that’s below as well!

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Crave #1 Review:

In the new series, Llovet introduces an app called Crave. With it, students can input whatever they desire, and be told whether that desire is achievable. Got a crush? Crave will let you know if you should tell them or not. Got a deeper, more deviant desire? It will help you with that, too.

Without getting into spoilers, host Justin Tyler felt this was “a fantastic premise that feels… almost close to reality. It’s a crowdsourced, love-interest app. This feels really prescient, in a great way. And on top of that, it’s just beautiful art, sexy… I just loved this read from top to bottom.”

Alex Zalben added that after becoming a fan of Llovet’s art from Faithless, it was exciting to see her strike out as a writer as well in this issue. “This is extremely successful in the first issue,” he concluded.

As for the premise, Zalben thought, “it makes sense to set it on a college campus because, of course, that is where it would spread with wildfire. We have this hint of a sci-fi premise in terms of, ‘Oh, everybody suddenly found this app on their phone.’ … This first issue is just the [tip] of the iceberg in terms of how it’s going to go horribly wrong…”

He also was impressed by the book’s ability to immediately thrust readers into this new situation without much preamble, then step back and set up the emotional relationships of the core cast. “It’s going to be very interesting to see how that most likely completely breaks apart over the course of [the] issues.”

Crave #1 hits comic book stores on November 29, 2023, from Image Comics.

Crave #1 Official Synopsis:

A mysterious app that promises to make your desires come true, spreads among the students of an elite university who use it as a hookup app. David, a top student, engages in a game of seduction with the unattainable Alexandra. But as requests to the app escalate and wreak havoc on campus, David and his friends’ only chance to stop this spiral is to find out what really lies behind Crave.