This Year's Must-Read Sci-Fi Comic Puts A Twilight Zone Twist On A Famous DC Storyline [Exclusive Preview]

Writer Deniz Camp has been reinventing the Marvel Comics universe, piece by piece, in his "Ultimates" series. Camp's Marvelous heroes reflect today's problems but remain true to their original spirit: a She-Hulk created through careless atomic testing near indigenous people, a Native-American Hawkeye fighting against environmental racism, a Luke Cage who organizes mass rebellion against mass incarceration, etc.

As "Ultimates" soldiers on, Camp is also launching a creator-owned science-fiction comic over at Image: "Assorted Crisis Events," penciled by Eric Zawadzki, colored by Jordie Bellaire and lettered by Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou. Even more exciting is that it's an ongoing series.

In "Assorted Crisis Events," the world is out of whack in a way it can only be in a comic book. It's all due to a favorite plot device of superhero comics, the multiverse; time, past, present, and every possible future are collapsing in on themselves. Walk down the streets of Manhattan and you can find dinosaurs on one block, space invaders on the next, and then come face-to-face with your own ancestors on the one after that.

In this comic, though, there are no men of steel or caped crusaders coming to save the day. The series' synopsis reads:

"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."

Camp has compared the comic to "Black Mirror," the OG "Twilight Zone," and described it as "'Crisis On Infinite Earths' if it was happening to normal people." The comic is an anthology, with each issue chronicling a different assorted event showing how someone(s) in the world are living through the Crisis.

The creative team has shared an exclusive preview of "Assorted Crisis Events" #1 with /Film. I have read this excellent debut issue and can heartily recommend it. If you need further convincing, the first 12 pages of the issue are included below. Camp also shared the following quote about his work:

"'Assorted Crisis Events' is the most ambitious book of my career. Everyone on the team is working hard to reinvent themselves not just for this series, but with every issue. We hope to use the technology of comics in new ways to tell deeply human stories, building off of all your favorite sci-fi tropes; daily apocalypses, time loops, multiversal incursions, dinosaurs running through a busy downtown. All from the perspective of regular people."

"Assorted Crisis Events" #1 focuses on a young woman named Ashley. Her parents disappeared in one of the Crisis' time-slips, leaving her all alone. She keeps a clock from her parents as a memento; despite her apathy, part of her is holding on desperately to what the clock represents.

Ashley lives in a city and sees the effects of the Crisis everyday, but she prefers to be looking at her phone and not up at her collapsing world. That gets difficult because there's a movie crew parked outside her apartment taking advantage of all the wild sights that emerge from the Crisis. (Why waste money on CGI dinosaurs when you can film the real thing in action?)

Now, we only meet Ashley on page 2, because the comic opens a tad abstractly with some masterful visual storytelling. The very first page of "Assorted Crisis Events" #1 tells you everything about the book

The top row of panels shows time being disrupted — Ashley's clock falls to the ground from a crisis-caused explosion. The clock cracks, but it keeps on ticking; the "tic toc" lettering goes from a straight line to more jumbled. Despite Camp citing "Crisis On Infinite Earths," this opening page's clock visual motif evokes Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' seminal "Watchmen" more. That comic, made and set near the end of the Cold War, shows what it's like living in a world sleepwalking to doom. So does "Assorted Crisis Events."

Image Comics

Image Comics

Image Comics

Image Comics

When superhero comics and movies tackle the multiverse, they get exhaustingly meta. The original 1986 "Crisis on Infinite Earths," by Marv Wolfman and George Pérez, was a vehicle to reboot the DC Comics' universe. Horrible monster the Anti-Monitor destroyed world after world, pruning the multiverse that DC editorial felt had gotten out of control. In the end, the DC Universe is reset to a single reality; the whole comic literalizes continuity as universal building blocks.

Marvel's counter to "Crisis on Infinite Earths" is Jonathan Hickman and Esad Ribic's 2015 "Secret Wars," which is also about the multiverse slowly collapsing. "Secret Wars" is excellent, but Hickman is a writer that often zeroes in on the great men of history. His creator-owned comics like "East of West" or "Black Monday Murders" are cabals of Earthmovers, people who wield institutional power to reshape the world. His 2019 "X-Men" relaunch was about mutantkind founding a homeland, Krakoa.

Hickman built up to "Secret Wars" in his interwoven runs on "Avengers" and "New Avengers," where the Illuminati discover reality-ending Incursions and fight to ensure their world will survive (even if others must die).

"Assorted Crisis Events" zooms out from the epicenter of this crisis. This comic is not about the villains causing the Crisis or the compromised heroes attempting to fix or survive it, but the everyday people living through it. That's a point of view that too many superhero comics can forget.

Image Comics

Image Comics

Image Comics

"Every week it's a new apocalypse. I can't keep track," Ashley thinks to herself. It's one of many unsubtle moments that speak to what this story is really about; the collapsing world we live in, where there's catastrophic news more often than there isn't. We're a culture in collective denial and compartmentalization; we don't live like we're in a crisis. "Assorted Crisis Events" suggests that time portals could open around us, cavemen and robots could pass us in the street, and we'd only nod and move along.

Compare Ashley walking through the streets, ignoring sights from armored knights to a man giving birth to himself, to the scenes of Theo (Clive Owen) riding a train in "Children of Men." From his window seat, he can see horrors happening outside, but he keeps his eyes pointed forward. Ashley doesn't even have the barrier Theo did. She has to directly walk through the time distortions but still tunes them out.

The last preview page shows Ashley running into what appears to be the comic's mascot (he appears on the cover of #1): an old, bearded man stranded from the future with a red jacket and goggles. He holds a cardboard sign marked with Jeremiah 8:20. That Bible passage reads: "The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved."

Both Ashley and the vagabond have unflashy but striking character designs; they don't look like science-fiction characters but you'd still pick them out of the crowd. That's one piece of Zawadzki's marvelous job on the book's art. His paneling and blocking is the book's greatest formal strength. I love the way he layers small boxy panels on top of bigger ones, making the comic compact but legible, and conveying the sense of many things happening at once. Bellaire's colors highlight Zawadzki's strengths; her grays for the relatively "normalcy" contrast with orange-red and bright yellow coloring for moments when the Crisis hits.

"This comic is a dream come true," Zawadzki' tells /Film. "I'm surrounded by collaborators who are at the top of their game. Every script Deniz sends me is an opportunity to reinvent myself. And Jordie Bellaire and Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou elevate my work beyond my wildest expectations."

Image Comics

Image Comics

Image Comics

"Assorted Crisis Events" #1 is scheduled for print and digital release on March 12, 2025; it is currently available for pre-order.