#Assorted Crisis Events

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Assorted Crisis Events #1

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Assorted Crisis Events #1 Script by Deniz Camp Pencils and inks by Eric Zwadzki Colors by Jordie Belaire Letters by Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou

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Assorted Crisis Events #5 (Image Comics, July 2025) variant cover by Alvaro Martinez Bueno

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[pedrocomicreviews]

Assorted Crisis Events #3

“This made everybody feel just lousy.”

Christ, who would want to read this?

Assorted Crisis Events #3

“Hearthlings were very proud of it.”

How could anyone ignore this?

Spoilers.

The main idea behind Assorted Crisis Events is reflecting the news, in a very Star Trek style. The comic book characters are going through exaggerated versions of what ails us in reality, as to make us think about the end of our own world, as it has been ending. War, famine, AI, the death of the free press, it’s… it’s everywhere around us, and it gets to be a lot. So I gotta wonder, do people really want their entertainment to be this direct? 

The fact of the matter is, the world is ending and is ending fast. We don’t know how long we have before the collapse of something important, and it makes me insane to think the only people fighting it aren’t in a position to actually affect things on a macro level. It’s so depressing, it’s so genuinely harrowing and despair-inducing, that it’s no wonder works like Assorted Crisis Events are reflecting horrible news as art. It’s a time-honored tradition to transform our pain and suffering into something we can point and laugh, cry and discuss. It’s also not for everyone, but maybe that’s fine. 

A book about a refugee crisis in 2025 is heavy in a way other books don’t get to be. Camp understands this, so maybe that’s the reason why this one feels so much more pointed, so much less about a metaphor of any kind. The two Hearths, our story this time, are equal, except Hearth-2 died first. We accompany how Hearth-1’s genuine attempts at taking in people who are literally the same as them into their lives slowly but surely fall apart as the realities of taking in a large population into a place not designed for that start to rear in their ugly heads. 

It’s tough to not feel nihilistic as you read it. It really feels almost inevitable, almost as if the book isn’t quite sure what the Hearthians could have done differently. When people are the same, this means they’re both just as good and just as bad as each other. It’s difficult to see a hopeful message out of that gutter of a worldview. Maybe the message is that despair is inevitable.

The survivors of Hearth-2 find company and shelter with Hearth-1, but are constantly reminded that they are not of this world. Even though many Hearth-1 citizens embrace them, they are immediately met with resistance by some, many times over concerns that do not exist. It doesn’t take long until lies start to feed into truths about the difficulties of a crisis like this. It doesn’t take long until all we can see is the road to hell, paved with good intentions, but with a hypocritical, paranoid finish you can’t help but step on as you walk.

There’s nothing more dehumanizing than being told your life is not yours to have, your hobbies are not yours to engage in, your family is no longer yours to love. This isn’t Hearth-1’s fault, mind you– fear of losing what one has is a normal human response. But the escalation? The trickery? The armbands? That is their fault. At no point is that a good idea. At no point is that necessary. At no point does that further the goals of either side of the Hearthians. Because there are no real sides. They’re all the same.

And if despair is inevitable, if it’s just something you have to brace for when tragedy strikes, then does Assorted Crisis Events believe there’s a point in trying? It’s a dour, dull story about how politicians take advantage of a horrific humanitarian situation in order to promote themselves through vile paranoia and an artificial feeling of Us vs Them. It doesn’t take that much for there to be a camp named Hearth-2, which turns into an unlivable slum as soon as the winter hits. The Hearthians of Earth-1 don’t seem to care as much as they seem to think there’s nothing they can do about it.

Are they wrong, though? They didn’t ask for this, and at no point does the story seem to wonder whether they had any responsibility for their fellows in the first place. There is of course the humanitarian relationship we all have, but when does one community reach its breaking point? Is being born in a good situation a crime, and does it make you a valid target for those who aren’t? ACE has no answer to that. It fills its pages with child abuse, murder, jealousy, and ultimately, with the understanding that we’re all so liable to manipulation, it’s difficult to figure out who was responsible for evil actions in the first place. And I think that’s just a really depressing thing to say about such a real issue.

What are we supposed to do about things that are only tangentially related to us? No one can really change the government’s mind, no one can really stop a war from happening, or a fire from burning a planet. Individually, a human is nothing more than what they own, and what they can protect. Protecting oneself is not a moral action. It should not be seen as cowardice; simply as instinctual survival. Yet ACE seems to believe the Hearthians don’t understand a hidden truth that is more important than the lack of food, shelter, work and peace of mind that the refugees bring to their town. 

How loud must one be when dying? How annoying is one allowed to be to their peers when suffering? ACE implies there is a massive problem with that question. The implication of the question is that one’s pain is only salient when they make it so. That is not the case. Trauma builds up. Trauma starts from the moment things go wrong. Trauma does not end when the bad times do; it stays with you forever, it changes you into someone else. Someone who can’t stop feeling pain. Someone who has lost everything they ever had and things they didn’t even know they possessed, and has realized there is nothing more important than the things you can’t afford to lose– your compassion, your love, your capacity for seeing others as yourselves. 

There is beauty in compassion, in the heart Hearth-1’s children show each other, no matter from what Hearth they come from. The understanding, the relatableness, the understanding that we’re all in this together, and that we can push each other up when we’re down. But children should not be the only layer of protection between someone and their own doom. There’s nothing children can do when the adults decide that you should, in fact, not say anything when dying. That you should not annoy them with your pain, no matter how much you’re trying not to. That those marked by trauma are too high-maintenance, too difficult to handle, and they ask for too much of their resources. It stops mattering that things could have been different, that there were other ways. It stops being a conversation when the other side stops listening. 

When adults decide they have nothing to do with a situation, all children can really do is to grow up faster. Grow up terribly wrong, in the wrong shape, but into the shape they need to be. A child denied their happiness will become an adult in the body of a child, unable to feel how they should, unable to do what they ought to, able only to survive by whatever means necessary. This survival is not a moral action. Surviving never is. 

And after all of this, all of the pain, suffering, xenophobia, slurs, killing, stealing, and all of it and more– it all comes down to politics. The Hearthians vote that citizens of Hearth-2 do not belong in Hearth-1. It is a landslide, the obvious will of the people. It’s a tragedy, of course– it incurs into in-fighting, into more war, more pain, and ultimately leaves them all without anything. 

What could they have possibly done differently, I ask? Are we really pretending there’s anything else one could do other than listen to consensus, than obeying the processes we all agree work? The story’s thin veil of metaphor is spotty at best in usage; it offers no realistic way out of the particular end of the world it proposes, and it really only makes attempts at showing us how bad it’s going to get. 

Look, that’s fine, I understand the point of that– I just want to know, am I supposed to feel bad over it happening in general, or am I supposed to feel bad about my role in it? It’s ultimately a story you’ve seen before in a well-drawn, well-executed format, but it will also just make you bummed out. 

I think we all read comics because they’re fun, right? Horror, action, biographies– they’re an entertaining medium like nothing else, and uniquely positioned due to the lack of necessity of a budget to show whatever you want. So why would you ever show something that can only depress? Shouldn’t there be hope at the end of this? Some way that we can see a hero winning out against a villain? 

Instead we’re left with ashes, and pain, and no one gets what they want despite doing what they thought was right. A painful read where everyone is miserable and there seems to be no future for anyone. The kind of thing you don’t really talk about very often, because why would you? It’s too sad. 

There’s not enough people from Hearth-2 to win any election. The systematic dehumanization of the refugees finally reaches the point it needs to reach in order for its ultimate agenda to be perpetuated: more death. More pain. More suffering, xenophobia, slurs, killing, stealing, all of it is the point of politics that make us go against one another. It gives power to the few and takes power from everyone else. It makes everyone else feel like they won’t be heard. Like they’ve been abandoned. 

The inferno that engulfs both settlements, Hearth-1 and Hearth-2, was not inevitable. Love could have won out, paranoia could have been stomped on, fear could have been addressed. The children knew this, and refused to engage with the adult’s killing game. The sight of two communities that were one being forced to now be less than the sum of their parts, to have nothing but what survived the destruction brought about through their own hubris and sum cost fallacies, fills one with a sense of dread and rage that should be maintained. You should be angry at this.

You should be angry at everyone who has ever said there’s nothing they could have done, at every politician who has ever lied on a stand, at every milquetoast appeal to cohesion that explodes someone else just because of the way they’re born, or what they’re like. You should be angry at every attempt to escalate a sustainable situation into an unsustainable one, at every cry for help that goes unnoticed, at every single gunshot you hear being shot at someone who wasn’t even resisting. 

How could anyone not be angry at this? How could someone really think they deserve to live just because of who they are, and others don’t? How loud can one possibly scream before it pierces through the thick veil of feigned innocence and plausible deniability? How loud can one get before their throats start to bleed? How fiercely do you have to feel about not wanting this to happen to be allowed to tell a story without the bells and frills of pure fantasy? How long until we can just talk about this? 

Nobody wants to die. Nobody wants to be the bad guy. Nobody wants to hurt anyone. But sometimes you have to fight for what you believe in. People get caught up in that crossfire. It’s the fire’s fault, not people’s. People just want to make it out alive. Maybe the fact the story is terrible to read is the only real point in telling it. Maybe we shouldn’t avert our eyes just because it’s not a metaphor. There’s no easy way out of a refugee crisis, and it’s hard to think of any way out, but we should still try.

Nobody wants to die. Nobody wants to be the bad guy. Nobody wants to hurt anyone. But sometimes you have to fight for what you believe in. People get caught up in that crossfire. It’s people’s fault, not the fire’s. Fire doesn’t want anything. Fire just burns. Maybe the fact the story is terrible to read is the only real point in telling it. We shouldn’t avert our eyes just because it’s not a metaphor. There’s no easy way out of a refugee crisis, and it’s hard to think of any way out, but we should still try.

If not for us, for the children. 

If not for us, for the children. They get it.

[mandatory-blog-stop-asking]

April 23 2025 comic reviews

Here's my reviews for this week, April 23, available over at my other blog, @pedrocomicreviews.

Long reviews: Assorted Crisis Events, The Power Fantasy, Absolute Wonder Woman, Absolute Martian Manhunter

Short reviews: Star Trek, One World Under Doom, Ultimate Black Panther, Magik

I've been sick since Easter so I didn't even know if I was going to do reviews this week; and then some of the best comics of the year came out this and I had to talk about it. RIP Magik, I really liked this issue but I'm kinda beat after writing ~10 pages of thoughts about the others.

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Assorted Crisis Events #4 preview. URGENT! PLEASE HELP! I have aged 60 years in 6 days! Life is rapidly passing me by, and I can't make it stop! #comics #comicbooks

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Assorted Crisis Events #1

Rider Waite Tarot - The Hermit

Comics are Tarot! I didn’t buy this reprint because we already have an earlier copy, but you gotta appreciate this Hermit homage. I was definitely tempted lmao!!

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Assorted Crisis Events #1

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Assorted Crisis Events #2 Script by Deniz Camp Pencils and inks by Eric Zwadzki Colors by Jordie Belaire Letters by Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou

[jkparkin]

Assorted Crisis Events #3 (Image Comics, May 2025) cover by Eric Zawadzki

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Honest Thoughts: Assorted Crisis Events #1 (Camp/Zawadski)

Since Deniz Camp's Absolute Martian Manhunter comes out tomorrow, I bought his recent original comic series last week with Assorted Crisis Events. It's essentially an anthology series with each issue being a one-shot story set during a temporal event that is occurring in the series world that not only brings in beings across time from the prehistoric past to the far distant future into the present, but also from different timelines as well. Now at first glance, this seems to be a very interesting and fantastic world to live in: seeing all these historical people across different periods of time and possibly interacting with them sounds great. However, issue 1 shows how messed up this world actually is.

Issue 1 lays the groundwork for how this world works with the Atypical Temporal Phenomenon (ATP) and how it's been affecting the present. First, there's the case of people being literally stuck in time with everything passing through them with seemingly no way of getting them out. Then there's the treatment of people from possible futures by the police and how they see those people as "nonexistent" despite, you know, still existing in the present. There's also the case that there could be a chance that someone's workplace won't have any idea about their existence in the first place, for who knows how long, meaning they would be without a job. And there's also the chance that a doppelganger from an alternate timeline can actually kill you if they're evil, if any other being across time doesn't do it first, like a dinosaur or killer robot. What I'm saying is, this world sucks to live in!

The story here really proves that point as we follow the days of her life during this crisis. Now I say days, but there could be the chance it could be longer since time doesn't work in this world, especially now that clocks don't work in this world, but that's sort of the least of Ashley's problems as the apartment complex she lives in is also the on-site location for multiple post-apocalyptic films, which that has to be illegal right? Just causing explosions for a film near someone's house or place of living? That has to be a disruption of peace, at least. One of the driving things in Ashley's story is with her clock, a gift given to her by her parents before their death, being broken from one of the on-set explosions outside her apartment. This is the main metaphor for the story, being stuck in time with not much movement at all. We see firsthand the problems of this world through her eyes and how she just wants things to end. The whole thing here is just trying to find some sort of verisimilitude or rather just realness in this whole thing and we're sort of just lost with her, especially during the final act, with her apartment complex being hit with an actual post-apocalyptic war and Ashley just thinking it's another film shoot. The last page really gives in to this confusion as she just lays there in the middle of the chaos with "CUT!" being at the lower right corner, not knowing if it's the story's actual reality or just another movie being filmed.

Nice art from Zawadski and all the little details, like with the multiple places having time puns for names and one sequence of a couple's relationship in the background of a few panels, from meeting up to proposing, to having a baby, to arguing, and ending with a divorce.

Overall, a really good story here from Camp and I would honestly pick up issue 2 and the rest of the series when they come out, especially since the next story involves dinosaurs. Do I like this more than The Ultimates? Not really, mostly due to there being more issues of The Ultimates compared to this one issue. Camp has really impressed me with him going 2 for 2 on stories I've enjoyed. With Absolute Martian Manhunter coming out, it could be 3 for 3 for me.

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okay I promise promise promise: even if you do not give a single solitary fuck about superhero comics (completely understandable), if you at all enjoy or are interested in comics or at least "genre" comics, you should read the currently ongoing series "Absolute Martian Manhunter". it will not be quite what you anticipate

[pedrocomicreviews]

Assorted Crisis Events #1

"There is no such thing as time. Time's a trick our minds play on us to keep us going."

Deniz Camp is on a career-making run.

The first time I read something by Camp was 20th Century Men, a book I randomly saw an acquaintance say it was good without giving any context. That acquaintance was correct. It's one of the most gripping original comic narratives to come out recently; it's heavy, focused, married to its themes and does everything in its power to make sure you get its message.

Assorted Crisis Events takes a much different approach. It's an anthology drawn by Eric Zawadzki of House of El fame, colored by Jordie Bellaire of Birds of Prey fame, and lettered by Hassan Ostmane-Elhaou of Poison Ivy fame, as well as counting with Tom Muller, the designer behind the X-Men Krakoa Era's look and datapages vibe. I give you all of these names because these happen to be some of my favorite people working this industry right now; I can't quite express to you how much of an all-star cast this is, it's kind of ludicrous so many of these times-defining artists are all working together.

And then the actual book is also very good! Sometimes you're worried that too many good cooks spoil the broth, but everyone has a time to shine here. This first issue has the job of introducing us to what's actually happening and what we can expect, and there's just so much happening here that it starts feeling almost overwhelming. And I do think that's the point Camp is making with his structure here.

We follow a lady named Ashley during some of what for us, would be the worst days of our lives, but for her is just normal. The worst days of everyone's lives are now commonplace since time became unwound. Everything happens at once and a lot of it is bad.

But that's not even the worst part, and I think this theme is where the anthology will shine: the worst part is how banal everything becomes. Movies start profiting off the apocalypse, people still have to go to work even if work doesn't exist, and unfathomable personal tragedy is just a fact of life. Nothing seems to work but everything has to keep going, and the constant exhaustion Ashley feels is beautifully rendered by everyone involved.

It is not a very happy book to read right now, when the world is actually imploding, but that too is part of the point. While Camp writes an exaggerated caricature of a world that could never really keep going, it is hard to say ours is feeling much more "realistic" right now. Casualties and horrible events become just something else that happened in our commune, entire countries go into upheaval and devolve in and out of fascism at the drop of a hat, and yet we still have to go outside and pretend life is just normal enough that we need our minimal wages.

Seeing a world where time is broken and yet still seeing our world in it is a little more depressing than I was expecting, but it never stops being interesting. It's a big, ~43 pages long book, and some portions do feel repetitive, but Ashley also feels like all the blood, guts and horrific events are repetitive. We get accustomed to her way of looking at things so fast and so seamlessly, it's almost a jump scare when the inevitable conclusion comes, just the way you knew it would.

I wouldn't mind seeing Ashley again, especially because I adore her design. But I'm very curious what the rest of the anthology is going to be like. Even if it's very good, I do feel like there's only so much you can write about the end of the world before it becomes too repetitive even for these themes of time feeling unreal. Still, Deniz Camp has yet to publish a bad script, so I'm all in either way.

Get this in your pull list, if only so you can see what's in the man's head when he's not writing Ultimates.

[mandatory-blog-stop-asking]

March 12 2025 comic reviews

Here's my reviews for this week, March 12, available over at my other blog, @pedrocomicreviews.

Didn't get a chance to read everything I wanted this week, so I'm probably doing more reviews than usual next week. Someone send me a copy of Assorted Crisis Events, damn it.

There's also a spoiler discussion for Iron Man #6 you can read here.

Tumblr changed the way it auto-makes thumbnails yet again and I'm not really interested in going against it, so enjoy that blog's avatar.

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Assorted Crisis Events #2 heads back to print #comics #comicbooks