Time has become unstuck, forcing various timelines to collide with each other. You might run into Nazis on the way to work. You wake up to find apocalyptic raiders and medieval knights battling outside your New York City apartment. Your double from another future reality might show up and kill you and take your place. All you can hope to do is survive and try to live for another second. Deniz Camp and Eric Zawadzki’s Assorted Crisis Events #1 mirrors our reality where you cannot keep track of anything anymore and feel that everything has gone to chaotic hell, and you try to live for one more day despite the overwhelming odds.
Following Ashley as she heads to her job at a restaurant, Camp and Zawadzki immediately drop us into the world, and we first experience how accustomed she has become to it. Hearing a crying woman begging for help to help her husband frozen in reality, she walks on. She sees a man’s chest burst open and explode due to his guts, but it does not phase her. Even the notion of her parents’ graves switching places with another set never makes her bat an eye. Despite how horrible and horrific all of these events appear to us as readers new to this world, it reinforces how numb Ashley has become to all of it. Seeing subway pirates may have initially freaked her out, but this has become her new reality. This “new normal” is just normal now. Just look at your phone and move on with your life despite the world breaking apart.
Ashley’s story of trying to fix her clock also feels like a grand, tragic, cosmic joke. On a surface level, the need for a clock when time has become uncontrollable and wild is unnecessary. Still, the sentimental aspect of its connection to her family ties her to a specific moment. Acting as an anchor that connects her to the world, she has nothing else to tie her to it. But that emotional aspect holds no value to the horologists she begs to repair it. This simple activity exists as this grand twisting odyssey that constantly shuts her down at every turn. Even trying to escape by jumping through a crater in the earth painfully reveals it as a painting on the road. Left with a destroyed clock and a collapsing world, she ponders if anything is left. “Is this how it really ends?”
Camp and Zawadzki also do an excellent job of portraying a reality that shifts between the real and the unreal. The presence of various film crews utilizing the destruction and crisis events for their work blurs the line between the unreal and the real. More specifically, they commodify this horror to a more consumable and marketable form, i.e., films. Instead of reckoning with the unraveling of time, they would make a quick buck off it. Similar to how Ashley and others ignore death and destruction, these movies provide an outlet and a false comfort to the population. Spend money to forget the world’s troubles for an hour or two. The pair highlights how easy and normalized it becomes to ignore reality’s pain and horror and focus on the more consumable version. Outside of the filmmakers, the cops failing to help the crying woman and even arresting the Broken Man before beating up Ashley reinforces this desire to protect and project a desired reality. Why do you need a few people to alert you to the smoke outside your door when you can keep inside your pretty bubbles?
Zawadzki’s art and paneling with Jordie Belaire’s colors and Hassan Otsmane-Elhou’s lettering solidify and expertly portray the varied tone and densely written story. Zawadzki’s phenomenal art and panel structure that bleeds outside of it towards the edges of the pages show how barely contained time is. The three portray a reality buckling under the weight of its unruly madness. Making me laugh, cry, and scared at the same time, Zawadzki, Belaire, and Otsmane-Elhou grasp and convey the emotional rollercoaster of this profoundly human narrative.
Assorted Crisis Events #1 by Camp and Zawadzki is a great first issue that demonstrates how deeply unpredictable and human this anthology series will be. It is an expert reflection of how we attempt to live and deal with our current reality, which threatens to drag us and kill us. The world will not end with a bang but with a cut as we look for the cameras to help us escape from reality.
Story: Deniz Camp: Art: Eric Zawadzki
Color: Jordie Belaire Letterer: Hassan Otsmane-Elhou
Story: 10 Art: 10 Overall: 10 Recommendation: Read
Image Comics provided Graphic Policy with a FREE copy for review
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