Assorted Crisis Events #6 // Review
The task is simple. John is being asked to draw an analog clock with the hands showing ten minutes after seven o’clock. He’s frustrated, though. So is Sasha Sasha’s his wife. John is telling Sasha that he’s not a baby. He’s not, of course...though he sometimes behaves like a toddler or an octogenarian. He’s suffering from retro-anterograde temoral diminishment. She’s trying to figure out how to deal with it in Assorted Crisis Events #6. Writer Deniz Camp and artist Eric Zawadski continue an exloration into human drama with colorist Jordie Bellaire. The latest is a sharply clever dissection of soe of the little things that are lst somewhere between birth and death.
John’s condition causes him to occasioanlly slip backwards decades in an instant. One moment he’s there functioning perfectly. The next moment he’s a child completely unaware of his current situation. Scared and confused. It’s a poorly-understood condition. There is no known treatment. The only thing that she may be able to do about it is send him to a nursing home. That’s the only alternative that she’s offered. He’s her husband, though, Is she really ready to do something like that to her husband? Can she afford to file him away in permanent medical care? Can she really afford NOT to?
The sixth issue of Assorted Crisis Events is probably one of the more haunting types of psychological horror imaginable. There’s no victimization. No abstract evil. Just tragedy. The tragedy of loss. The tragedy of living as a fragmented ghost the way so many are who are so challenged by the basic anecdotal memories which string together som any lives. Camp strng together a remarkably clever narrative that hits the page with impressive force and captivating poetry. It’s incredbily moving drama that clearly serves as one of the beter entries in the series thus far.
The challenge is to do something like this in a way values usually compelling. And there are various visual hooks that the writer and artist used to deliver this specific story in a way that could not be handled in any other format. Though it is a simple drama it wouldn't work well on the stage due to the fact that the emotional reality of it is brought forth with rapid shifts in visual age on the part of John. It's not really easy to do that on the stage. It's not really easy to do that in a compelling way that feels realistic on the screen either. The visual layout of some of the spreads also does remarkably clever work of delivering the narrative in a way that feels trivoli fresh and engages the subject matter on its own level.
Once again, Camp and company do a really good job of delivering everything in a way that feels fresh and distinct. And it does show without feeling particularly heavy-handed or over exaggerated. There is a very striking intensity about all of it that hit the page in just the right way. It's going to be hard for.Camp to t op this i future issues.
