Is there anyone better at the “world outside our window” ethos that ostensibly infuses all comics than Deniz Camp? It’s abundantly on display with his Marvel work on The Ultimates. And it carries through here to Image Comics’s Assorted Crisis Events #1, a book that is ostensibly a meta-narrative about living in a world of constant comic book crossovers… But is very much about what it’s like to live in our world, today.
Written by Camp with art by Eric Zawadzki, colors by Jordie Bellaire and letters by Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou, Assorted Crisis Events is an ongoing anthology set it a world that has become unstuck from time. Imagine if you lived in the Marvel Universe, or the DC Universe, and every week your city was blanketed in ice, or thrust into eternal darkness, or “merely” taken over by Nazis, cavemen, dinosaurs, aliens, etc, etc. It’s a well-beaten drum asking why people live in Gotham City in DC, or New York City in Marvel. But the fact of the matter is, people do live there, and they continue to live there.
But also, people live in New York City in the real world. I lived in New York City during 9/11, working a mere 20ish blocks away from the World Trade Center when the first — and second — planes hit. I heard the bang. I felt the ground shake. Later that night, I looked out my window and could see the smoke pouring from the ruins. And somehow, you keep going. Somehow, despite the pain and loss and terror, you keep heading to work every day, because you need the money to live. Even as things get worse with prevalent antisemitism, with COVID-19, with any of a million things… You keep going.
That’s the essential metaphor the team is dealing with here, through the lens of people glued to their phones to find out about the next temporal anomaly, instead of a push notification about how President Trump has attacked the trans community, or attempted to dismantle the Department of Education. We live in a world of non-stop horror, but, like the characters in Assorted Crisis Events, we keep moving forward, until we can’t anymore. And then we move forward again.
The complex narrative Camp builds here juggles being glued to your phones with how we process disasters through the lens of entertainment, and how that entertainment changes us. Zawadzki and Bellaire elevate that through panels that bleed off the page and into each other, images of our main characters crossing each other making you wonder what is really happening — or if there is any reality at all, other than what we, the reader, perceive?
In that, Camp and company seem to be turning the lens on themselves. How complicit is entertainment in our removal from the sheer terror of the modern world? Is entertainment pointing a finger towards action, or allowing the semblance of action without any real forward movement? Heck, am I complicit in writing a review of a comic that points a finger at what ails our modern world, taking an even further step away to present what’s inherent in this comic book with a critical eye rather than striving towards making change myself?
Maybe? There’s certainly a difference between crafting a narrative, or analyzing a narrative, and attempting to change the narrative. But the hope is that books like Assorted Crisis Events, which effectively walk the tricky line between being entertaining and analytical, will spur on the thinking that does lead to some sort of action. While we don’t need to battle back alien forces, or deal with a new ice age, the metaphors present throughout this first issue are a call to do something rather than be frozen into inaction. Time is broken, our world is falling apart. The question is whether you fall flat on your face trying to remove yourself from it, as our main character does in this first issue; or stand up and make a difference.
Camp offers no easy answers here. But he does offer a thrilling glimpse outside our window in a way that urges you to actually look outside that window and see what’s happening. Time is ticking forward, and we need to make some sort of move, do something before the next crisis hits.
Assorted Crisis Events #1 hits stores on March 12, 2025 from Image Comics
Assorted Crisis Events #1 Rating:
Assorted Crisis Events #1 Official Synopsis:
Time is having a crisis.
Mingling in the red-light district, you can find actual cavemen, medieval knights, and cyborg soldiers on leave from World War IV. Victorian debutantes amble their way into cell phone stores, confused and bewildered (what is a data plan?). On their way to work, bleary-eyed commuters get trapped in time-loops, assaulted by alternate-reality versions of themselves, and try to avoid post-apocalyptic wastelands. And LOOK: the 3:15 bus just took a wrong turn…into the neolithic era.
Rising stars DENIZ CAMP (20TH CENTURY MEN, The Ultimates) and ERIC ZAWADZKI (House of El) and Eisner-winners JORDIE BELLAIRE and HASSAN OTSMANE-ELHAOU are proud to present ASSORTED CRISIS EVENTS, an ongoing, zig-zagging anthology series about the compromised clicks of our clocks—full of one-shot stories both beautiful and ugly, tragic and redemptive, surreal and somehow all too familiar. Stories of people (and reality) in CRISIS—trying to keep it together while the world is falling apart, second by twisted second…
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