Reality is, by its nature, uncertain. When we step outside our front door, we never have concrete assurance of what we’ll meet. What will one wrong turn bear? How will one cross word change the course of your life? Entropy is a given and none are immune.

But what if you’re not just contending with this reality, but multiple realities? Different time periods? Parallel lives and worlds? What is time is no longer a North Star? Those questions and more are addressed in the new anthology series Assorted Crisis Events, debuting this month from Image Comics. In Assorted Crisis Events, “The Crisis” has made time no longer reliable. People can slip in and out reality and timelines. You can never know if your turn around the corner will take you to your intended destination or in a 31st century hellscape. Will you encounter ninjas on your way to work? Will doing your laundry shift from the mundane to being stranded in the Jurassic era? Life is more fluid that ever—and never more chaotic.

I spoke with Assorted Crisis Events writer Deniz Camp recently about the idea behind Assorted Crisis Events, the collaboration with the creative team, the influences behind the book, and why audiences engage the idea of the end of it all.

Assorted Crisis Events is one of those books that immediately taps into the cultural heaviness and ennui and just the EVERYTHING of it all of the present. You’ll be enthralled with every page and you’re sure to linger—on the detailed, dense pages and the weight of the reality the characters are mired in. When do we become numb to the chaos about us? How do we balance not becoming inured to the cacophony of pain and pandemonium with the realities of having to get through the day? As much as I lingered on the pages, that question that Camp and company sparked lingered with me long after I set the book aside.

 

 

FreakSugar: Before we get started on the book itself, what was the genesis behind Assorted Crisis Events?

Deniz Camp: There are kind of two answers to this.

I looked at the world around me, a world that seemed constantly in crisis, where terrible things seemed to happen daily, and I thought, how can I talk about/process this in comic book form?

The other is, I’ve long wanted to do an ongoing creator owned series, but I knew that I needed a strong story engine to do it, a central conceit that allowed me to tell a lot of different kinds of stories (so that the readers and I wouldn’t get bored), but would somehow connect everything.

Assorted Crisis Events was born out of the fiery collision of those two things.

FS: For folks considering picking up the comic, what is the conceit behind Assorted Crisis Events?

DC: The very reductive, one sentence pitch(s) are:

Crisis on Infinite Earths if it was happening to normal, everyday people.

OR

Black Mirror if time and space were breaking down.

Assorted Crisis Events is an ongoing anthology series, with each issue following different characters dealing with “The Crisis” – a crisis in time, in which time itself is breaking down and creating all kinds of terrible, wondrous, impossible situations. So, on your way to work, you might take a wrong turn into the wrong century. Or sitting on the couch scrolling on your phone, you might get caught in a time loop for a million years. Each issue tells the story of someone dealing with this kind of crisis, and the whole series slowly develops the story of what caused it, who is trying to take advantage of it, what the consequences of it are, and whether it can be stopped, reversed, or undone.

FS: Ashley is our through-character in issue #1. What can you tell us about her?

DC: She’s just a normal person, a waitress at a cheesy chain restaurant. The scale of the Crisis is totally beyond her, and yet she is forced to confront it daily in all these myriad ways. The first issue is really just about her trying to get through her day-to-day life, like a lot of us, when all around her the world seems to be ending, in familiar and unfamiliar ways.

FS: Eric Zawadzki’s art is detail and gritty and clearly defined all at once. In a world with so many different types of people from different eras, everyone and everything fit together so perfectly. What has been the collaboration been like with him and the rest of the creative team?

DC: The best comics come from the most intimate collaborations, I think, and this one is very intimate. I write full script and give Eric as much as I can, but then he takes what I give him and consistently elevates, adds, and just generally makes everything better – while always staying laser-focused on the story, on what I’m attempting to do. The best artistic collaborators are the ones who see what you’re going for, but more often see a better way of getting there. Eric is like that; he’s an engineer, an architect, a mathematician of comics. His work is intricate and clock-like, which is perfect for this series, and I’m writing with that in mind, writing to his strengths and proclivities.

The same is true with Jordie Bellaire, the colorist, who is approaching the pages like no one else would, adding a ton, clarifying a ton. And ditto Hassan Otsmane Elhaou, our letterer, who is well known in comics for being an innovator. Add in Tom Muller, who designed our logo and is doing the design pages, and it’s just a very special team making very special comics.

FS: I love how dense yet reader-friendly issue #1 is. There’s always something to linger on: a line of dialogue, a detail in the art. I’ve re-read the book three times and there are pages I just lingered on for more time than I might with other comics. The entire time I read the first issue, I kept thinking, “We all do this. We normalize the chaos in our minds when we get through the day.” Did you ever think about that while writing the book?

DC: Yes! That’s exactly the vibe I’m trying to get across! All this stuff that I think, on the face of it, horrifies us, we either ignore or accept, for the sake of our own sanity. We’ve been systematically disempowered, made to feel that these problems are too big for us as individuals to solve, too big even for our failing, moribund institutions to solve – so we dive into our phones, or our TV shows, or whatever.

And thanks, yeah, density is important to me! I want people to have a lot to chew on – everyone on the team does.

 

 

FS: The conceit is something that I think a lot of toyed with as kids: “What if cavemen and ninjas and soldiers and sci-fi future folk all existed together?” Did you ever think about that sort of thing as a kid? Or put all your action figures on one field?

DC: For sure! One of the things I talked a lot with Eric about was that the conceit means that crowd scenes or street scenes or whatever never have to feel boring; not only can they be visually more interesting, but you can play little games with cameos and background gags and all of that.

FS: One of my favorite lines from the first issue is “My dad used to say, ‘There’s always someone making money on the end of the world.’” And wow, that hits hard lately. Why do you think we’re so engaged in stories about the end of it all?

DC: There’s something very freeing about end of the world stories; modern life is complex, but life after the end is relatively simple, it’s all about survival. There’s a clarity to life in the Mad Max world that isn’t there with ours.

FS: What are you reading right now?

DC: Right this second, Freshwater, by Akwaeke Emezi.

FS: Are there any other projects you’d like to talk about?

DC: I’m continuing on with Ultimates, and Absolute Martian Manhunter with Javier Rodriguez launches just two weeks after Assorted Crisis Events – it’s a very different approach to comics, and I’m really excited about it.

FS: If you had one final pitch for Assorted Crisis Events, what would it be?

DC: It’s one of the truest, most human, things I’ve written, and everyone is pulling out all the stops to make it one of the best things you’ve ever read.

Assorted Crisis Events #1 goes on sale Wednesday, March 12, 2025, from Image Comics.

From the official issue description:

SERIES PREMIERE
Time is having a crisis.
Mingling in the red-light district, you can find actual cavemen, medieval knights, and cyborg soldiers on leave from World War IV. Victorian debutantes amble their way into cell phone stores, confused and bewildered (what is a data plan?). On their way to work, bleary-eyed commuters get trapped in time-loops, assaulted by alternate-reality versions of themselves, and try to avoid post-apocalyptic wastelands. And LOOK: the 3:15 bus just took a wrong turn…into the neolithic era.

Rising stars DENIZ CAMP (20TH CENTURY MEN, The Ultimates) and ERIC ZAWADZKI (House of El) and Eisner-winners JORDIE BELLAIRE and HASSAN OTSMANE-ELHAOU are proud to present ASSORTED CRISIS EVENTS, an ongoing, zig-zagging anthology series about the compromised clicks of our clocks—full of one-shot stories both beautiful and ugly, tragic and redemptive, surreal and somehow all too familiar. Stories of people (and reality) in CRISIS—trying to keep it together while the world is falling apart, second by twisted second…