Assorted Crisis Events #4 // Review
Mike is waking-up on the first page. He’s a young kid who has to head off to school. By the end of the second page, he’s an adult a couple of weeks into a new job. A few pages later, he’s on a first date with a woman who is pregnant by the end of the next page. Things can’t really slow down. Time flies in Assorted Crisis Events #4. Writer Deniz Camp continues his journey through a particularly interesting anthology series. The issue is brought to page and panel by artist Eric Zawadski. Color graces the page courtesy of Jordie Bellaire.
Things are moving very, very fast for Mike and he may not be ready for this meeting, which they happening. But, really, who is prepared to live out the rest of their lives? It all happened so quickly. Turn around and it's a few years later. Turn around again and it's a few decades later. Before long as the end of your life. That's kind of the situation that Mike finds himself in never really able to adjust to the always one step behind the rest of the world. Always just out of sync. Never fully processing the substance of the moment.
Camp tells a story that only really would make a whole lot of sense in a comic book format. This is quite an accomplishment in itself. It's kind of an experimental sort of script writing. An entire life plays out over the course of a single issue. Granted, he's not exactly getting into conception and birth, and that sort of thing. But we pretty much see this whole life of Mike. All of the major points. All of the major details. So cleverly outlined. So brilliantly delivered to the page with a scalpel's precision. Exquisite work.
Zawadski is handed quite a bit of a challenge. Years and decades and major milestones in Mike's life have to feel coherent as they're whipping by. Every single page. There's another major event. It has to be totally and completely earthbound, but the speed of it has to feel like shock and awe. Zawadski does a really good job of anchoring the action in a realm of the mundane while watching it all happen with blinding speed. It's all remarkably well articulated from beginning to end. Mike really looks like he's aging over the course of the issue. It's a very simple and coherent progression of ages from grade school to high school to college-age and beyond.
This sort of thing hasn't really been explored in a great detail on the comics page. A single life. Roughly 20 minutes of time if that. And it all plays out with such speed. And every major point in this person's life hits the page with such brilliant concision. And it really wouldn't work in any other format. Theoretically, you could do this on the stage or on the screen. But it wouldn't have the same impact. Because everything that's presented in a static image. And you can see so much of it playing out and you can go back effortlessly simply by flipping back a few pages. It's an entire life on a linear timeframe with a whole bunch of images. It's an entire life between two covers.
