Assorted Crisis Events #2
Writer: Deniz Camp
Artist and Main Cover: Eric Zawadzki
Variant Covers: Artyom Trakhanov, Gabriel Hernández Walta
Page Count: 40 pages
Release Date: April 23, 2025
This review contains spoilers
After the break-out success of 20th Century Men and his Ultimates run, Deniz Camp’s return to Image with Assorted Crisis Event has been intriguing if perplexing. Time travel mechanics are a lofty ambition for any aspiring genre writer, but the comics format allows for unique opportunities to play with timing motifs.
But rather than going big on an epic, so far the title has leaned more introspective. Rather than following up on the mystery and characters introduced in the first issue, Assorted Crisis Events #2 pulls a swerve, introducing a gut wrenching and dynamic character faced with the impossibilities of life in America, and how the perception of time can equally hearten and dishearten one’s soul.
Assorted Crisis Events #2 focuses on the life of one Jesus, a first-generation Latin-American immigrant. His life is told through a series of interwoven flashback snapshots (not unlike Dr. Manhattan’s life story in Watchmen #4). As a boy, he and his family travel across the border via river crossing, where one member of their caravan is attacked and eaten by a crocodile. A little older, he is frightened by a velociraptor exhibit in a museum that reminds him of the encounter. As a young teen the boy is disappointed when he and his mother are forced to tend to his drunken father, laying face down in the gutter. He is slapped by his mother for insulting his dad’s integrity, claiming he would never become like him.
As an adult, he begins working at his father’s workplace; a beef processing plant, specifically the killing floor. The work is stressful and, and the sight of blood causes Jesus to frequently faint. One day, his father slips on an overhead grate directly into a grinder and is killed right in front of Jesus’s eyes. At the funeral, Jesus’s mother is devastated. Weeks later, his mother passed away as well. Jesus attends some post-trauma work counseling solely to get his return to work order form signed. Every loss in the book feels tragic, these characters’ lives are as brief as our own.
Life moves forward. Jesus is about to have a child, and he’s desperate for different work. He gets turned down from an entry level dishwashing gig as he has no paperwork. He’s forced to return to the Meat Plant, where he is met by a mentally disturbed coworker. He watches his child grow older, being able to hang off the monkey bars by her knees.
All these moments culminate in a vicious and shocking raptor attack, echoing Jesus’s experience crossing the river, his trauma at the museum and his father’s mutilation. As Jesus bleeds out from getting his hands bitten off, he reaches a sublime sensation as he is reunited with his family, experiencing all of his life at once.
While I’ve been critical of Camp’s sometimes over ambitious approach to style over plot, Assorted Crisis Events #2 is perhaps one of the best examples of playing with Scott McCloud’s theories on aspect to aspect and scene to scene transitions. The clever double entendre and call backs infuse a sense of cruel irony that only a genuine A-grade writer can get away with.
Zawadzki is pulling out the big guns at the end of the work. The book is adorned with beautifully rendered images in immaculately designed page layouts. There’s a cleanliness to Zawadzki’s line that makes the book so easy to read, even while trying to keep track of the constantly changing timeline. But then you consider Jordie Belaire’s restrained color palette choices. The book is haunted by the color red, which literally bleeds across every page.
While the first issue of Assorted Crisis Event intrigued me, Assorted Crisis Events #2 left me gob-smacked. Masterful work on all fronts by emerging talents is what I love to see, and this issue has it in spades. Assorted Crisis Events #2 captures the unfortunate reality of life in the twenty-first century: for some folks, everyday feels like a crisis. The only difference is our reality is privileged enough to not have to deal with Dinosaur attacks…so far. April has been full of heaters, and this issue is among the best.
