Assorted Crisis Events #2 // Review
Jesus sees a raptor attacking him. He’s got vivid visions of it. A merciless predator looking for fresh flesh to prey upon. Elsewhere, Jesus IS new meat...on the kill floor working at a meat processing plant. It’s all a wash in his head: childhood, working, the birth of a child. It all dizzily mixes together. It’s all there in Assorted Crisis Events #2. Writer Deniz Camp and artist Eric Zawadski explore the darkness some must tread through in order for so many of the rest of us to merely exist. Color comes to the page courtesy of Jordie Belaire.
Jesus is having vivid visions of everything. It all blurs together. There IS one particular moment that seems to stand out in his mind. He was there at work on the floor. Somewhere around his 150th kill of the day. (By then you’re not even thinking anymore...just letting the machine work and doing your job as an extension of it.) There’s this cow...just like the other 150 he’d killed. Right after he delivers the bolt, he sees it looking at him...and he swears he can see its whole life that led to it ending there that moment...and he runs away.
Camp weaves a whole lot of different narratives and themes into the story of one man and one job and one life. It’s kind of a breathtaking look at so much of what it is to have to be human at this point in history. From childhood to adulthood. From the death of the animals to the deaths of relatives. The blood is everywhere. There are predators of so many kinds on so many different levels in so many different ways. It’s darkly poetic throughout. As a one-shot it’s an interesting look into the nature of humanity.
Camp’s script is kind of a difficult one to bring to the page. There’s this constant, incessant shift in scene, and setting--nightmare and life. It’s going to be difficult for any artist to bring that to the page in a way that feels fluid and graceful. Zawadski does an admirable job of maintaining some kind of coherent life to it all. There’s real horror and nightmare horror and Zawadski does a brilliant job of articuating it all in a way that engages the emotions...amplified as they are by Belaire’s mix of reds, yellows and tans. It all feels so very, very intense.
And then there’s the drip of the blood in the background as the story continues. The gutter between the panels is progressively more and more saturated with the dripping of the blood as Jesus is lost further and further into the life that he must lead. It’s powerful stuff from beginning to end...and the dizzy nonlinearity of it all only s eves to amplify the tension as the story jumps around A LOT. It’s fascinating stuff that really embraces the dramatic potential of the comic book page in a way that doesn’t happen very often.
