In this column, our resident ‘comics guy’ Fred Azeredo expounds on a single comic book issue every month. Not necessarily the biggest, not necessarily the best, just one he thinks is worth discussing! See if you agree!
Sometimes a premise is just so damn good that the author gets drunk on it and forgets to, y’know, flesh out the story and all that. This certainly seems to be the case with Deniz Camp’s Assorted Crisis Events. Although I’m still holding out hope for it to get over its own self-admiration and create something truly special, said admiration is admittedly well-earned. The book seeks to show a world where time is out of joint and all of history is blurring together, a seemingly impossible task—but one at which it actually succeeds rather spectacularly.
Courtesy of Eric Zawadki’s pencils and inks and Jordie Bellaire’s colours, the visuals rise gloriously to the occasion. Both artists manage to genuinely convey the utter chaos of such a world, which could easily have looked like just our reality with some cavemen thrown in, and make it come alive. The crowd scenes are filled with impeccable detail and Bellaire’s signature eye-popping palette—most noticeable in a surrealistic red-filtered alien invasion at the very end—keeps the reader swimming in awe and anxiety at the same time. As Ashley, our hero, meets raving street prophets from a dystopian future or shows up to work only to find herself in an alternate reality in which she’s not employed there, we feel her disorientation and exhaustion at the unpredictability that constantly surrounds her.
Given Camp is hardly an apolitical writer, the obvious analogy to the nonstop turbulence of our time is probably intentional. Ashley lives in a permanently precarious state where survival outweighs all other considerations, and she might simply disappear at any moment, just as her parents did. She eventually hires a private detective, who discovers that they ended up in the 1840s, but when she inquires as to their fate, he replies, “You don’t want to know”. This soon becomes her motto—a very relatable one for many today, particularly when faced with a daily avalanche of bad news.
This is a compelling parallel, for sure, but it’s also one that illustrates the book’s main problem: it’s just a compelling parallel and nothing more. I have no idea what moves Ashley as a character besides her stock dead parents backstory, which drives her repeated attempts to repair the smashed clock they left her. The irony, of course, is that clocks in Ashley’s world are useless aside from decoration. Assorted Crisis Events abounds with clever details, and it has many clever things to say about how late-stage capitalism warps time and society along with it. But it’s also that overwhelming cleverness that keeps us from really engaging with the story on an emotional level. Here’s hoping Camp is able to counterbalance that with some stronger character work in the coming issues—then we might really have something here.