Assorted Crisis Events #7 // Review
Tom Doublay has a problem. He keeps showing-up dead. It’s okay. It’s not like he’s going to let it stop him from living as best he can. All that death is really more of a nuisance that anything: he’s got to keep finding ways to dispose of his own bodies when they turn-up. He’s going to have to find a way to deal with it in Assorted Crisis Events #7. Writer Deniz Camp delivers one of the single most original ideas to hit the new comics rack all year. The story is rendered for the page by artist Eric Zawadzki. Color comes to the page courtesy of Jordie Bellaire.
Tom wakes-up in bed next to his own corpse. So naturally he’s going to bury it in his own back yard. That’s easy enough. And it’s easy enough driving the next one to the landfill, but that’s only going to be a solution for so long. Sooner or later there’s going to have to be a lasting solution to all of Tom’s corpses. It’s just a matter of working out how best to dispose of his own bodies. Clearly there has to be some sort of hallucination. That’s all.
Camp’s absurdist/surrealist horror story is insanely clever. It’s one of those ideas that seems so totally obvious in retrospect that it’s surprising that no one else had already come-up with it sooner. Disposing of a body can be a very big part of any horror story. What happens when it’s a guy perpetually trying of a seemingly endless parade of his own corpses? It’s such a brilliant, little idea that touches on so much about the nature of mortality and identity. Such amazingly clever stuff o so many levels in so many ways. It all feels so smartly-framed.
The challenge for Zawadzki is to keep every different version of Tom’s corpse unique and distinctive without actually being so different that they don’t look like each other. Maintaining the horro end of the story is really important as well. Play-up the absurdist humor too much and you’ll lose the dramatic, existentialist dread. Zawadski nails the perfect balance between horror comedy and serious drama by making it all share the same space on the page. It’s not an easy thing to manage on the page, but Zawadski nails it perfectly. Colorist Jordie Bellaire find the perfect lighting, space and depth in the issue.
Camp and company are going to have a very tricky time trying to top the seventh issue in the series. It’s remarkably well-executed seventh issue. The full reality of the anthology series hasn’t quite been revealed yet, but the seventh issue really manages to find the perfect space in the perfect place for a new format on everything as it all moves forward into the next issue. Tom Doublay is SUCH an interesting character in so many different ways. There are so many different ways of executing everything. It’s remarkably good work.
