Assorted Crisis Events vol. 1
I may be warming up to writer Deniz Camp’s superhero work (slightly), but his creator-owned stuff is another matter. His breakout miniseries at Image, “20th Century Men” with artist Stipan Moran, was a boring and disappointing take on Russia’s invasion of Afghanistan that wound up being the worst thing I read that year. Still, the guy started getting higher-profile jobs at Marvel and DC, which caused me to wonder if there was something about his work that I was missing. Now here we are with his latest creator-owned title, with artist Eric Zawadzki, and I’m not wondering anymore.
“Assorted Crisis Events” is a hard series to describe, so let’s see how they did it on the back cover: We’re told straight up that “TIME IS HAVING A CRISIS!” and promised cavemen, medieval knights, and cyborg soldiers on leave from WWIV mingling in the red light district for starters. There’s also Victorian debutants ambling into cell phone stores, commuters getting trapped in time loops and assaulted by alternate-reality versions of themselves, and a bus taking a wrong turn into the neolithic era.
It sounds like we’re getting a wild and crazy adventure with all of the stuff that’s mentioned there, right? Wrong. The only bit there that actually shows up in the volume itself is the part about people being assaulted by alternate-reality versions of themselves, and even that’s stretching it. What we get is an anthology of stories that use the idea of time and the perception of reality breaking down to tell stories about the human condition. Spoilers: The human condition really sucks!
The volume starts off with a story about a girl trying to get her clock fixed and all of the issues she encounters in trying to do so. Whether it’s the movie being shot in her apocalyptic-looking apartment block, the fact that clockmakers are specialists in this world who only take on jobs that interest them, or the fact that atemporal events are occurring on a regular basis around her, there’s always something. This is the one story in the volume to actually grapple with the idea of time breaking down around its protagonist and actually implies a connection to a larger world and story. The playfulness with which this is executed doesn’t matter, however, as any thought of adding this kind of context to the following stories is abandoned with the ones that follow.
There’s the immigrant working in a slaughterhouse whose memories become unstuck in time only for him to be consumed by an early childhood memory. Then you’ve got the people in one regular American city who become refugees in their identical alt-Earth counterparts and who wind up having to deal with the problems of actual refugees. That’s followed by the life of this one guy whose life is passing him by, and he doesn’t realize it until it’s too late! Vol. 1 concludes with the story of a girl stuck in a time loop, only it’s actually trauma!
Science fiction has always been used as allegory to talk about the real problems facing mankind. In other words, it’s a lot easier to get people to listen to you discuss the evils of racism if some aliens are involved. Camp doesn’t do that here. The sci-fi touches in these stories feel more like afterthoughts and removing them wouldn’t change most of the ones being told in this volume. Credit where credit is due, the alt-Earth refugee story is the exception to the rule here, and it illustrates the other problem with these tales. Which would be the fact that they’re glaringly unsubtle about the issues they’re addressing. We all turn into our fathers as we try to return to our mother’s embrace! We’re all humans, there are no refugees on Planet Earth! You’ll only have regrets if you never make any choices! DOMESTIC ABUSE IS BAD AND CAN REALLY MESS YOUR KIDS UP!
Even if Camp is trying to find new ways to make these points, he can’t resist hammering them home at every single opportunity. It quickly gets old and isn’t helped at all by how just about all of them end on the same downbeat note. I get that these are real problems – Camp won’t let me forget them for an instance – but all the writer is doing here is just stating that. There’s no attempt to present solutions for them which leaves you depressed and wondering if the writer just didn’t have the guts to present any. There’s a chance that they may have been simplistic or overly hopeful, but that’s preferable between leaving the reader to wallow in the misery of issues they’re already fully aware of.
If nothing else, this winds up being a great showcase for its artist. Zawadski is asked to draw not just an incredible variety of things in each issue and throughout the volume, but in very specific ways as well. The first issue has so much on display that it’s amazing the artist is able to make it into a coherent whole. Subsequent issues then require him to both maintain formalist discipline in sticking to a specific style, or to display genuine ingenuity as he conveys the story through spiraling grids.
It’s fantastic work in service of stories that don’t deserve it. The setup for “Assorted Crisis Events” could’ve been used to create a fantastic mish-mash of eras and people clashing together – as promised on its back cover. Instead, we get a series of painfully unsubtle reminders of how bad things are without any ideas about how they can get better. Camp is re-teaming with Moran for the Vertigo relaunch next year for a zombie story called “Bleeding Hearts.” After their previous collaboration, and the writer’s work on this one, I’m convinced that it won’t be worth my time.