From the very start, Assorted Crisis Events has refused to behave like a “normal” comic. Each issue bends form, tone, and expectation, using high-concept sci-fi not for spectacle, but as a prism for deeply human anxieties. Whether it’s identity, isolation, or emotional burnout, the series consistently experiments with what comics can do, and how they can make us feel, by grounding the bizarre in the painfully relatable. Issue after issue, it’s challenged readers to rethink structure, perspective, and even what counts as a beginning or an ending.
Assorted Crisis Events #9 turns that experimental lens inward, delivering a story about a comics creator who begins to lose himself as the boundaries between fiction and reality collapse. As time accelerates, bodies fail, and memory fractures, the issue becomes a frantic meditation on creative obsession, aging, and the terror of watching life slip away while still trying to make meaning out of it. It’s a chapter that goes beyond playing with the language of comics, delving into the cost of creating them and asking what happens when the work consumes the person making it.
Like something straight out of the classic Duck Amuck, Assorted Crisis Events #9 opens on our main character speaking right to us. He utters “Can you see me?!” in a full-page splash, wide-eyed and looking scared. We soon find him on a city street holding a brown bag of booze, scaring passersby. He soon mentions that he stuffs things down the gutters, with the bottom of the page featuring an extra-wide gutter in a visually creative, stunning moment before the page turn.
That bottom panel and its interaction with the gutter is fantastic.
Credit: Image
Much of this issue plays with gutters, from the white spaces between panels zigzagging and our main character commenting on and interacting with them, to the gutters seemingly taking over huge swaths of the comic. Artist Eric Zawadzki blows you away with creative ways of bringing this comic book aspect to life in new and interesting ways. This is a story about a man who lost it all making comics, so much so that it’s as if the vernacular of comics has become his life.
Story-wise, writer Deniz Camp does a good job making this prideful comics creator fall from grace to something that belongs only in the gutter. A flashback reveals how he found his success, but the constant need for hits meant putting his own life into the stories. Once the conflict of his life comes into focus, the story devolves into more abstract lines as his life and his career blur. The relationship of the artist, the reader, and his own life combines in ways that are reflective and compelling. This is a man who did what he loved and lost himself in the process.
The sci-fi weirdness of it all isn’t as clear as past issues, although one could argue it’s his ability to see the reader, us, from another dimension, consuming his life. You see it in how he interacts with the page, be it with gutters or losing his color entirely. In this way, it’s as if he’s lost his mind, but we’re experiencing it through the comics form itself.
Assorted Crisis Events #9 is a daring, unsettling meditation on the cost of creation, using the very language of comics to dramatize a life unraveling. By turning gutters into psychological space and collapsing the boundary between reader, creator, and character, Camp and Zawadzki craft an issue that feels at once exhausting and exhilarating. It may not offer easy answers or familiar structure, but it stands as one of the series’ most ambitious and thematically resonant chapters—a reminder that sometimes the medium itself is the message.
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