Carrier recovery through digitized I and Q?

Hi,

Can carrier recovery be achieved through a digitized (i.e. a single bit stream signal from a comparator, not ADC) I and Q signal?

To recover the carrier from a quadrature modulated signal, you need to know the modulation scheme and an unique property that allows to decide about the carrier phase. The effort depends.

I don't expect that a comparator serves the purpose in most cases. If it does, the achievable SNR will be considerably worse than with a recovery algoritm using the full signal.