<img src="https://comicvibe.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/0526IM0488_cvrA.jpg" alt="ASSORTED CRISIS EVENTS, VOL. 2 TP | Image Comics“>
Assorted Crisis Events, Volume 2
Writer: Deniz Camp
Artist: Eric Zawadzki
Colorist: Jordie Bellaire
Letterer: Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou
Publisher: Image Comics
Publication Date: August 2026
What if time itself was falling apart at the seams? Having not just one crisis, but a series of unmitigated disasters, completely changing the lives of everyone in the world? What happens to the stories of individual people in these moments is the focal point of the widely acclaimed AssortedCrisis Events, the Eisner-award winning series from Image Comics that returns for its second volume this month, collecting issues #6 through #9 of the brilliant science-fiction series. Structured as an anthology of stand-alone stories, reminscient of Black Mirror and The Twilight Zone, Assorted Crisis Events is a comic formalist’s dream, utilising every single aspect of the medium to it’s advantage to tell moving, horrifying, hopeful and devastating stories about what happens to human lives as time and space itself ceases to function normally.
The series’ first volume, which released in the fall last year, saw the brilliant creative team of writer Deniz Camp (Ultimates, Absolute Martian Manhunter) and Eric Zawadzki (House of El, Eternal) explore stories of overlapping timelines in one location, infinite slaughterhouses where you still have to work from 9-5, refugees escaping to alternate universes, aging 60 years in 6 days, and being trapped in a timeloop for millions of years. All of these one-and-done narratives are beautifully explored, focusing on individual characters and how their psychological states evolve and collapse under the pressure of these far-flung science-fiction concepts. It’s brilliant stuff, and this volume continues that, delivering four more individual stories that push the series even further, resulting in a brilliant collection of comics that is impossible to put down, even if you probably should take your time with it.
When describing Assorted Crisis Events online, Deniz Camp has often said the following:
It’s as true as we could make it.
Arugably, there’s no better way to describe the thematic focus of the book. Inspite of all of the antics of time and space, things falling apart in the most grandiose and troubling of ways, and how often brutal and sensational the comic can often be, it’s does a remarkable job at capturing how it feels to live in a world gone out of order, where it feels like every day is overwhelmingly occupied by how things keep on getting worse.
Now judging off that initial description, you might reckon this is a series that is remarkably depressing and downbeat. That’s not necessarily incorrect to say – not a lot of happy endings for the folks around here, that’s for sure – but there’s a sense of dry, deeply sarcastic dark humour to it which makes even some of the darkest issues a well-balanced read. The series definitely plays with the notion of absurdity, and how that can both be suffocatingly horrific and incredibly funny at the same time. Sometimes the situations characters find themselves in lend themselves to comedy naturally, sometimes it’s human nature prevailing and finding the hilarity in even the most nauseating of situations. Regardless, it’s a heavy read, but never to the point of meaningless bleakness, and it still has moments of levity and sincerity that allow for it to overall work without getting too intense to stomach.
The first issue in this trade collection is the much acclaimed issue #6, which focuses on married couple John and Sasha, as Sasha acts as his carer whilst John suffers from ‘retro-anterograde temporal diminishment’. In other words, he gains and loses years of age seemingly at random, bouncing between childhood and old age, losing his memory and his mind in a manner similar to Alzheimers or Dementia victims. He’s “unstuck in time”, in other words, and it wears down Sasha, who loves him deeply but struggles to keep up with the mericless onslaught of his condition. This is a story about love, and what it means to look after someone you love when they can no longer look after themselves, and it’s an ode to all of the carers, nurses and caregivers across the world. It beautifully and effortlessly moves between moments of gutwrenching tragedy and warm, earnest sincerity, as Sasha and John cycle through ‘good’ and ‘bad’ days depending on the random nature of his condition. The end result is one of the most striking and beautiful comics I’ve ever read and one of the few to make me weep, and for it alone this volume is worth a purchase; yet, there’s still three other excellent issues here.
Issue #7 follows Tom Doublay, a regular man who is struggling to make ends meet, pay his rent, keep friendships and stay healthy, all while suffering from a mysterious affliction that means dead copies of himself from alternate universes randomly spawn in without rhyme or reason. This is one of the bleakest and funniest issues in this trade, written with a sarcastic edge as Tom desperately attempts to maintain some sense of normalcy and regular life in spite of his own corpses occasionally popping up in bed, or at work, or in an ice-cream shop. As he tries over and over again to maintain a regular life, ignoring the horrors around him, he has to figure out how to live with his condition instead of fighting it. As Tom puts it: “One dead Tom is a tragedy, one hundred and nineteen dead Toms is a disposal issue.”
Issue #8 sees Deniz Camp and Eric Zawadzki obliterate the fourth wall and utilise the techniques of comics formalism to tell the story of Wally Webb, a silver-age comics artist who is invisible to all of those around him. Taking inspiration from the work of scholars such as Will Eisner and Scott McCloud, the duo play with the notion of ‘the gutter’ to explore how Webb’s life collapsed in on itself as he ruined his own life and career in a series of terrible decisions. The entire larger series plays with the form of comics, using advanced visual and literary techniques to explore changes in time and space, but it’s wonderful to see the terminology of comics studies placed at the very centre of this narrative. It also wrings tragically true, as Wally succumbs to the same issues many creatives do, obsessing over his work to the point of neglecting his life and focusing on the “gutters, everywhere”.
The final issue of the trade, issue #9, follows Chuckie, a ‘Temp’ who engages with the ‘trans-temporal multiversal employment arbitage app’ of the same name to acquire part-time work across human history and different parallel realities in order to send money to his sister. This ranges from serving as a ‘violence consultant’ in an epic war against two ostensive ‘time-lords’ waging a cross-dimensional conflict against one another, to aiding in the construction of the pyramids, to knocking out Jesus so a politician can get a selfie. Late-stage capitalism is intensely satirised here, returning back to the pitch-black comedy of issue #7 but with a healthy dose of sociopolitical commentary that Deniz Camp writes brilliantly, complimented by some of the biggest-in-scale art that Zawadzki has ever done for the series.
Deniz Camp’s writing is nothing but stellar throughout. Quickly becoming a superstar of the comics scene, Camp has a brilliant eye for great narration and uses narrative voice to the fullest extent, yet consistently experimenting and never attempting to do the same thing twice. This allows every issue to shine on an individual level as well as forming a stylistically complete whole, a mosaic of small stories that all focus on the experience of the world falling apart. His dialogue is great too, equal parts human and stylised, reminscient of comics legends such as Grant Morrison. These stories feel intimate emotionally despite their scope, feel genuine depsite their complexity, and never feel boring or grating. It’s remarkable stuff, and anyone who enjoys this books’ style should absolutely check out one of Camp’s other creator-owned series, 20th Century Men, which is in a similar vein.
Eric Zawadzki’s artwork is just as stellar, brilliantly utilising every page and relaying complex, multifaceted narratives with effortless ease. His artwork is the perfect mix of stylised, cartoon-like expressions and gritty, specific details that allows the reader to both imagine themselves or the people they know in the characters and their experiences whilst maintaining a degree of seperation. His page layouts are stunning, truly using every bit of space to depict as much as possible. You’d think this would get overwhelming, but Zawadzki always ensures the page is clean, readable and easy to comprehend. There are some individual panels and moments in this where Zawadzki genuinely blew me away with his artwork, some of the best in the industry today, crafting sequences that I don’t think I’m likely to forget anytime soon alongside colorist Jordie Bellaire.
Thematically, Assorted Crisis Events is unsurprisingly focused on concepts of space and time. It’s both utilising the physical space on the comic (the panels, the gutters and everything in between) to convey this and play tricks on the reader by manipulating their sense of linear time as they read. There’s definitely some formal antics happening here as Camp and Zawadzki explore the way your brain commits to closure (the act of filling in the blank space between panels) and what can actually occur in that timeframe. This all sounds pretty complicated and maybe a bit off-putting, but it’s got a sense of trickster-like fun to it all that makes it all work. These are two talented creatives using the medium to do some weird things and not play into what’s expected of them. It’s a story about time and space that in and of itself uses comics to play with time and space. This couldn’t be a TV show, or an animation, or a movie. It’s a comic and that’s fundamental to why the series works. Comics don’t have to follow time linearly, so if there’s a man changing ages in the blink of an eye, they can just show that by contrasting between panels. They don’t need to follow the rules, and in fact it’s sometimes even better to break them.
There’s also the emotional content of the narratives themselves. Assorted Crisis Events is a politically-minded book that is explicitly connotating to the world we live in and the socio-cultural state of our time. It’s engaging with the lived experience right now, and I think it’s fair to say that for a lot of us that lived experience is pretty tumultous, as the world seems to be ever-rapidly getting worse as we all watch on in horror. There’s commentary on how it feels to be a carer, and how to satisfy your own emotional needs and live a fulfilling life whilst still supporting someone who can’t look after themself. There’s analysis of late-stage capitalist gig economies that see us destory ourselves or betray who we are in order to economically support ourselves and the people we love. There’s themes of dissasociation, depersonalisation, and depression running through all four of these stories, and how we keep sight of ourselves in times where everything feels completely and utterly out of our control.
I could not think of a more important book for our times, and even though it’s quite emotionally taxing, it always feels like essential reading, as Camp and Zawadzki use Assorted Crisis Events to help us cope with the world we live in, by escaping into different ones, whilst never losing track of who we are and the real things we feel and experience. Brilliantly constructed in every way, from astonishingly good and emotionally nuanced writing to stunning, intricate and beautifu lartwork, this is a must-read and a candidate for one of the best comics of the decade so far. It’s a weird world we live in, one where things often make no sense and powers outside of our control make decisions that can make or ruin our lives in an instant. However, it’s a world where we have each other, and we have stories that can help us process our feelings, vocalise our thoughts and recall some of the good and bad without having to personally relive it. At the very least, it’s not a world where someone can age 50 years in a second, run into a dead copy of themselves from another universe, see the gutters of the universe itself, or travel back in time to fight dinosaurs with roman soldiers. Not yet, at least. There’s always time.
Assorted Crisis Events Vol. 2 is out now
Read more great reviews from The Beat!
