A comic book for the Polycrisis
A Review of Assorted Crisis Events #1 by Deniz Camp, Eric Zawadzki, Jordie Bellaire, Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou, and Tom Muller
Sydney Literature and Cinema Network Convenor, Caméra-Stylo Journal Editor, and PhD candidate in Literature at Macquarie University specialising in Metamodern Comics.
There are comics you come across that reinvigorate your love for the medium. Composed by writer Deniz Camp, art by Eric Zawadzki, colours by Jordie Bellaire, Letters by Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou, and designs by Tom Muller, the first issue of Assorted Crisis Events (ACE) is such a comic book.
The book is such a complete artistic work that it feels unfair to single Deniz Camp out, but it’s worth noting what a phenomenal run he’s currently having writing mainstream American comics despite being described as a ‘rising star’ in ACE’s blurb. Camp currently writes The Ultimates, the main team-book and the most critically acclaimed of Marvel’s newly rebooted Ultimate Universe (akin to writing the main line of the Avengers), and he has recently launched a Martian Manhunter limited series for DC’s new Absolute Universe. Interestingly, both these titles fall outside the Big 2’s default continuities, which, Marc Singer notes, provides ‘more space for experimentation.’ Camp is certainly worthy of a long career in comics and the kind of bibliography favoured by Eisner and other award institutions.
ACE is published by Image comics, a company whose creator-owned rights model continues to push the boundaries of creativity in the Anglophone market and has for decades now. ACE is Camp’s first work with Image since 2022’s 20th Century Men, a superhero alternate history of the Afghan-Soviet war of 1979-1989. 20th Century Men’s interrogation of the superhero genre’s imperialist underpinnings while leaving space for Afghan voices to articulate their needs left me with high expectations for Camp’s return to Image. Fortunately, Assorted Crisis Events is highly recommendable to anyone interested in mainstream American comics in 2025.
Assorted Crisis Events is an anthology series, so each issue will be a contained narrative with new characters. The first issue’s narrator is Ashley, a young woman who walks through an apocalypse each morning on the way to her work at a restaurant. She nonchalantly walks through a science-fiction post-apocalypse that turns out to be a film set. It’s now cheaper to film in her neighbourhood than on a studio lot. ‘They say it doesn’t take much to make this place look doomed,’ Ashley narrates. This passage highlights one of ACE’s key themes: the closing gap between post-apocalyptic fiction and reality. The post-apocalyptic remains a popular genre to grapple with the present, but the filmmakers interested in its many iterations are unable or unwilling to acknowledge that, for many people, the post-apocalyptic already forms the dominant aesthetic of their lives. Blinkered by their own industrial machine, the directors often yell at Ashley just for walking to work because it hurts their bottom line.
There is a real apocalyptic crisis amidst these fictional ones too. Ashley’s phone repeatedly dings, warning her of an ‘atypical temporal phenomenon’ nearby. ‘Time is breaking down,’ Ashley narrates. ‘The distinctions,’ she continues, ‘between past, present, and future are…confused.’ The result of this is a world where cavemen, medieval knights, ancient Egyptians, hippies, and cyberpunk refugees from the future share the sidewalk, people fall out of their time, or their lives happen out of order–babies burst from the chest of their older selves, Xenomorph-style. Mark Fisher describes this experience as dyschronia: ‘in which it is no longer possible to securely delimit the present from the past, in which the traces of lost futures unpredictably bubble up to unsettle the pastiche-time of postmodernity.’ ACE #1’s temporal breakdown produces Fisher’s dyschronic affect of cultural stasis and inertia. Inured to widespread suffering, people cope with The Crisis by repressing and accepting it as outside of their control.
Zawadzki’s art and Belaire’s colouring show the flattening of these events and quick assimilation into normalcy. The background colours are washed out grey, muting the weirdness of juxtaposing a caveman and Viking warrior next to Ashley and a backpack-adorned 21st century citizen. Only a single figure is made salient with colour, indicative of the way manufactured crisis and precarity perpetuates selfishness. In such a quantity, the weird loses its affective force. Nothing stands out and everything is the same shade. Rather than focus on the single salient figure in colour, Bellaire’s colouring directs attention to the background. More time is spent deciphering the background figures than on Ashley. Despite the visual salience of following a single character through the narrative, contemporary comics reward the close reading of panel backgrounds. Focalising through Ashley, the comic’s emphasis is on her perception and experience of the world, not her interactions with it. Without too many spoilers, the plot is minimal and consists of mundane errands and activities. Ashley repeatedly takes her clock to be fixed and drinks alone while doomscrolling after work.
ACE #1 exemplifies Adam Tooze’s notion of “polycrisis”, named to direct ‘attention to the diversity of challenges without specifying a single dominant contradiction or source of tension or dysfunction’. ACE, however, simply calls this ‘The Crisis,’ which more closely resembles Anna Kornbluh’s “omnicrisis”. For Kornbluh, omnicrisis ‘signals a universality rather than a multiplicity, one owing to the last determining instance of the economic.’ Is Kornbluh right that our experience of crisis is at root economic? Does Tooze’s attempted separation underappreciate the interlocking nature of contemporary crises? The comic aligns more closely with Kornbluh by describing the experience of crisis as all-encompassing and entangled. Directing attention to fictional crises overlooks the material conditions of manufactured austerity and precarity that make people’s lives worse. Despite the sheer scale of crisis that feels out of our control and engenders Fisher’s dyschronic atmosphere of inertia and stasis, these are economic systems that can be repurposed for human needs.
Works Cited:
Mark Fisher, "The Metaphysics of Crackle: Afrofuturism and Hauntology," Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture 5(2): 47.
Anna Kornbluh, “Us Too: Ecocide and Metalepsis in Susan Choi’s Crisis-Form,” Polygraph 29 (Summer 2024), 160.
Marc Singer, Breaking the Frames (University of Texas Press, 2018), 64.
Adam Tooze, ‘Chartbook #165: Polycrisis - thinking on the tightrope,’ Substack, https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-165-polycrisis-thinking. 30 October 2022.
