Hero’s Cave
Manga artist: Sid Madei
Publisher: Silver Sprocket
Publication date: July 2025
Dark Fantasy Dungeons have recently begun to expand their reach under the bright surface of mainstream culture. Despite the level of hardships of punishment, Soft’s Action RPG Elden Ring was a breakout hit in 2022, creating adaptations for the manga series and upcoming films. In many ways, the harsh story of the undead knights and the ruined kingdom of Eldenling spoke directly to the periodists of the prolonged covid pandemic. We, who felt trapped in our home and alone, weren’t we all just as cursed by our destiny? We weren’t abandoned by the king? We didn’t need to pledge ourselves to an endless grind of resources?
Syd Madia’s Hero Cave is one of many mushrooms that sprout from the fertile soil of the dark fantasy genre, following fromsoft’s success in the pandemic era. This lean but powerful graphic novel takes visual inspiration from a dungeon exploration game filled with underground corridors, hooded necromancers and horde of skeletal structures that stretch with swords. Despite its eerie imagery and respect for the pathological tone of the sideless side of the dark fantasy genre, Hero Cave is a clever comedy that stands up against the cultural sense of the Malamars, offering not only a faint light of hope, but also a grand explosion of joy.
The unknown skeleton does an unappreciative job as the first monster to challenge exploring adventurers who smash into the depths of underground dungeons. Skeletons do their best, but the heroes who leave Yelp reviews are not impressed. Still, no matter how many times a skeleton gets knocked down, they always come back – whether they want to.
They have been doing this for hundreds of years and it’s time to meet the necromancers who manage the dungeons for a scary performance review. The dungeon master is as banally evil as the boss, and he has at least no interest in the welfare of the workers. When he reveals the retirement plans he imagines for the skeleton, it becomes clear that even a death (second time) they will never get rest or pay for their employment.
Shaking, unmistakably, the skeletons are in an existential crisis, and they recognize that their work has eliminated a sense of personal identity. With nothing to lose, they indulge in shameless elimination. Their excessive hedonism may seem ridiculous and counterproductive, but a night of bad behavior may give them the space they need to think about what it means to escape the dungeon for good.
It’s easy to look down at NPCs, who are “non-player characters,” who seem shallow and less interesting when compared to the main character. In certain aspects of your life, it’s not that easy to realize that you yourself are far less superior to NPCs. Player vs. Monsters: Creating a video game monster and the broken JaroslavŝVelch explains how the construction of a Dungeon & Dragons monster reflects the concerns of white-collar management class. For dungeon masters, even a miraculous creature, like a walking skeleton, is nothing more than a set of numbers entered into a spreadsheet. Given the frequency with which social media algorithms, insurance companies and certainly employers are returned to data points, it’s probably worth sympathy for the low-level skeleton.
The hero cave is not just sympathetic. It’s sharp and satirical, fun and weird. To be free from workplace expectations, skeletons become sexy, violent and grotesque. If you don’t enjoy a well-do work, liberation lies in expressions that do not have self-attitude. Sid Madya’s art rises to the challenge of expressing skeleton transformation through a cathartic explosion of details and movement. What starts as a cute workplace comedy about friendly talking monsters climbs into a stunningly strange sequence of open panels and fluid shift lines. The expanse of the comic’s closed landscape is gorgeously cathartic.
Hero Cave is a short but rewarding excursion for fans of RPGs from Dungeon & Dragons to Dark Souls, speaking to readers who appreciate the more sensitive approach to fantasy ratios, as modeled by comics like dungeon tasty and comics. For artists, Hero Cave is an interesting study of how loose drafting styles can effectively convey the themes and appeal of stories, particularly in terms of the thoughtful dismantling of Madia’s anatomy and architectural stiffness. Even for readers who have never stepped into the dungeon before, Hero Cave is a dark but relevant comedy about Daily Reinde, reminding us that we welcome the destructive joy of becoming inordinated.
Hero Cave is available from Silver Sprocket.
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