Assorted Crisis Events Vol. 2 Review: Image Comics Turns Time Into Something Personal, Brutal and Unforgettable
Time is still having a crisis—and in Assorted Crisis Events Vol. 2, so is everyone caught inside it.
Writer Deniz Camp and artist Eric Zawadzki return with another devastating collection of science-fiction stories where temporal disasters are less about saving reality and more about the ordinary people forced to live with reality breaking around them.
Published by Image Comics, Assorted Crisis Events Vol. 2 collects issues #6–9 and arrives August 19, 2026, priced at $16.99. Image lists Camp as writer and Zawadzki as artist, while the collection credits Jordie Bellaire on colors, Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou on letters, Tom Muller as designer, and Wesley Griffith as production designer.
Readers can explore the complete Assorted Crisis Events series at Image Comics before diving into this second volume.
Time Travel Without the Adventure
Most time-travel stories ask where you would go if you could visit another era.
Assorted Crisis Events is more interested in asking what happens when time stops asking permission.
That distinction remains the series’ greatest strength.
The four chapters collected here—“Time Slips,” “Dead Toms,” “Life in the Gutters,” and “Temps”—approach temporal instability from completely different directions.
Sometimes the result is heartbreaking.
Sometimes it is grotesque.
Sometimes it is darkly hilarious.
Frequently, it is all three at once.
“Time Slips” Is the Emotional Gut Punch
The collection opens with its most intimate story.
Sasha is caring for her husband John, who suffers from what the comic calls retro-anterograde temporal diminishment. Instead of progressing through life normally, John can suddenly become a different version of himself—sometimes the husband Sasha recognizes, sometimes a frightened child, sometimes an elderly man whose memories and identity are slipping away.
The science-fiction concept is bizarre, but Camp and Zawadzki use it to examine something painfully recognizable: caregiving.
Sasha loves John, yet love does not magically eliminate exhaustion, resentment, fear, guilt, or grief.
The visual storytelling makes the concept even stronger. Clocks, puzzles and changing versions of John become structural elements of the pages themselves, transforming time into something Sasha is constantly trying—and failing—to organize.
It is an excellent example of what this series does best.
The impossible becomes painfully human.
“Dead Toms” Goes From Absurd to Horrifying
Then the book changes gears completely.
Tom has an unusual problem: dead versions of himself keep appearing.
The collection’s imagery establishes the premise immediately with a field of different dead Toms surrounding the living one. Soon, another mutilated version of him is appearing in his bedroom, leaving him with the increasingly routine problem of figuring out what to do with his own corpse.
It is grotesque.
It is funny.
And underneath the absurdity is something much darker.
Camp takes an idea that could easily function as a one-joke Twilight Zone premise and keeps pushing until the existence of alternate dead selves raises uncomfortable questions about identity, mortality and whether seeing endless versions of your own death would eventually stop feeling extraordinary.
Zawadzki handles those tonal shifts extremely well. One page can be ridiculous, the next genuinely disturbing.
That instability is deliberate.
“Life in the Gutters” Breaks the Comic Itself
The most formally experimental chapter may be “Life in the Gutters.”
Here, the language of comics becomes part of the story.
A struggling homeless comic-book artist finds himself interacting with the literal spaces between panels. People seem unable—or unwilling—to acknowledge him, while the layouts begin reflecting his increasingly fractured relationship with both reality and the medium itself.
Panels no longer feel like simple containers for scenes.
The gutters matter.
Page composition matters.
Perspective matters.
Even being seen matters.
This is where the collaboration between Camp and Zawadzki becomes especially important. The concept cannot work through dialogue alone; it depends on a reader physically understanding how comic-book pages normally function and then watching those rules get disrupted.
It is weird, inventive and exactly the kind of formal experimentation that distinguishes Assorted Crisis Events from more conventional science fiction.
“Temps” Turns the Gig Economy Into Temporal Horror
And then we reach “Temps.”
The premise is wonderfully vicious.
What if the gig economy expanded beyond food delivery, rideshare apps and temporary staffing and started outsourcing labor across time itself?
The chapter introduces an employment app promising access to jobs throughout history. A financially struggling worker signs up and suddenly finds himself assigned to dangerous situations in completely different eras—including a “violence specialist” job in the King Kronos Cross-Time Legions paying just $13 an hour.
That single idea tells you almost everything you need to know about the chapter.
History has become another labor market.
Human danger has become an algorithmic assignment.
And temporal catastrophe has somehow acquired an app.
It is funny until you recognize exactly what Camp is satirizing.
Then it gets uncomfortable.
Eric Zawadzki Makes Every Crisis Look Different
One of the most impressive qualities of Assorted Crisis Events Vol. 2 is that the stories do not simply reuse the same visual grammar.
Zawadzki adapts the storytelling to each concept.
“Time Slips” uses repeated imagery, clocks and puzzle motifs.
“Dead Toms” embraces body horror and duplication.
“Life in the Gutters” manipulates the physical structure of comics.
“Temps” incorporates phones, apps, advertisements and gig-economy interfaces directly into the page.
Jordie Bellaire’s colors are equally important. The palette can move from restrained domestic scenes into aggressive reds, oranges and surreal temporal environments without losing coherence.
Meanwhile, Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou’s lettering has the difficult job of keeping experimental pages readable even when the book deliberately destabilizes traditional panel flow.
The collection credits this core team alongside design work from Tom Muller and Wesley Griffith, with Zawadzki providing the collection cover.
Four Stories, One Larger Crisis
The anthology-like structure makes each chapter accessible on its own, but the stories increasingly feel like pieces of the same larger phenomenon.
People are slipping through time.
Bodies are crossing realities.
Comic-book reality itself is breaking.
Businesses are finding ways to monetize temporal instability.
And somewhere underneath everything, the mystery surrounding the man in the jetpack continues developing. The collection’s own description specifically notes that this ongoing mystery deepens alongside the four major stories.
That continuity prevents the series from becoming merely a collection of clever science-fiction exercises.
Something bigger is happening.
We just do not understand it yet.
Why Assorted Crisis Events Vol. 2 Works
The best thing about this collection is that its science-fiction concepts are never the destination.
They are the mechanism.
John slipping through his own lifetime is ultimately about love and caregiving.
Dead Toms are about identity and mortality.
The disappearing comic artist becomes a story about invisibility and artistic existence.
Temporal gig work becomes a viciously recognizable satire of economic desperation.
That combination explains why the book can be sad, funny, horrifying and absurd without those tones fighting one another.
Image describes the volume as another assortment of “sad, beautiful, experimental, funny, gory” stories, and after reading these four chapters, that description is remarkably accurate.
Where to Buy Assorted Crisis Events Vol. 2
Assorted Crisis Events Vol. 2 TP arrives August 19, 2026 from Image Comics with a $16.99 cover price and Lunar code 0526IM0488. It collects Assorted Crisis Events #6–9.
Collectors can also check the Midtown Comics listing for Assorted Crisis Events Vol. 2 or ask their local comic shop to order the collection.
For more creator-owned releases, previews and reviews, visit our continuing Image Comics coverage.
Final Thoughts
Assorted Crisis Events Vol. 2 is ambitious science fiction that never forgets the people suffering underneath the premise.
Deniz Camp continues finding frighteningly clever ways to break time, but the real accomplishment is making each temporal disaster feel personal.
Eric Zawadzki is equally essential. His page construction does not simply illustrate Camp’s ideas—it frequently becomes part of the idea itself.
There are bigger science-fiction comics.
There are bloodier ones.
There are certainly easier ones.
But few are currently using the medium itself with this much confidence.
Score: 9/10
Verdict: Assorted Crisis Events Vol. 2 is smart, strange, emotionally brutal and visually inventive. If you want science fiction that experiments with both time and the structure of comics, this is an easy recommendation.
Join the Discussion
Which Assorted Crisis Events concept hits hardest for you: a loved one slipping uncontrollably through their lifetime, discovering dead alternate versions of yourself, falling between comic panels, or working a minimum-wage job across history?
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