Are you or someone you love suffering from retro-anterograde temporal diminishment? Do you find yourself vacillating between child and octogenarian from one moment to the next? Is it increasingly difficult to remember important details such as your name, your address, the date or the faces of cherished loved ones? If so, see a doctor and ask about your options. Then read Assorted Crisis Events #6, written by Deniz Camp, drawn by Eric Zawadzki, colored by Jordie Bellaire and lettered by Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou for Image Comics.
My parents both turned 76 this year. We didn’t celebrate. When it was my mom’s birthday, it was because her brother had just died after spending the last years of his life in an assisted living facility. When it was my dad’s birthday, it was because my mom had just gotten some medical news that I won’t share here because it’s not mine to share.
So I was already in a raw place about my parents getting older when I opened Assorted Crisis Events #6, the first issue of a new arc after what had been a stellar introductory run.
The issue tells the story of Sasha and her husband, John, who has been diagnosed with “retro-anterograde temporal diminishment.” Basically, at any given moment, he can become a version of himself at another age, both physically and mentally. One moment, he’s a with-it 38-year-old man. The next, he’s a scared 3-year-old boy crying for his mother. The next, he’s a scared 83-year-old man, still crying for his mother.
So guess what, it’s not a story about retro-anterograde temporal diminishment. It’s a story about dementia. It’s a story about not being able to piece together who you are from one moment to the next. It’s a story about the caregiver slowly being drained of joy and hope as the one person she thought she could count on finds new ways to disappear every moment of every day, until he nearly Benjamin Buttons out of existence.
Sasha could send John to a nursing home at any time — give herself the space and time she desperately needs. But she can’t. Her husband is still in there, somewhere, in the space between the little boy who doesn’t recognize her and the old man who can’t understand what happened to his life. She lives for the liminal moments between young John and old John, when her husband shows up, eating oatmeal and blueberries and making jokes about the birds in their yard.
I couldn’t tell you whether Deniz Camp or someone else on the creative team has had to care for an aging parent with dementia or Alzheimer’s, but it sure feels like someone with that experience was at least a beta reader. Concepts like memory care, support groups, the importance of routine, John’s mood swings and frequent accidents, and Sasha’s unending tiredness are treated with the utmost care, presenting a genuinely human experience amid the hard sci-fi concept.
Poorly drawn clocks serve as a reminder throughout both of the series’ general conceit that time is broken and John’s continual changing into versions of himself that either never learned or have long since forgotten how clocks work, the numbers sliding and melting into each other in wobbly blobs approximating circles until they’re no longer recognizable as the object they’re intended to be — the lessons of Understanding Comics turned into a nightmare.
Eric Zawadzki draws Sasha and John’s life within the borders of things like informational pamphlets for John’s affliction, a puzzle of memories John can’t put together, a ball maze signifying an elderly John’s quest to find a bathroom in a home he doesn’t recognize, and a Clue-like board game where John has to learn and relearn about the death of his parents — another of the two-page loops he’s proved so adept at creating over the course of this series.
By the time Sasha nearly has to say goodbye to John, this comic had already done the thing only a handful of comics have done in my lifetime.
It wet my face.
By now we know of the pattern of Assorted Crisis Events. Time has become unstuck. Things happen out of sequence. People get stuck in loops. That guy with the white beard and the jetpack shows up, like a retrofuturist Santa Claus delivering gifts of human suffering. Zawadzki draws one or more two-page spreads that require the reader to turn the book this way and that, putting its characters on an infinity-loop that rewards the physical reading experience in a way that benefits comic shops.
But all of this — ALL OF IT — is sugar coating for a story about the abject unfairness of human existence, and how we persist in the face of it. The cycle repeats, the injustices continue, but somehow, the victims of time — and we are all victims of time, be it the arrow-shaped version or the Jeremy Bearimy one — find a way to keep going.
To read this series is to run the gamut of human emotion. Go get your sneakers.
Buy Assorted Crisis Events #6 here. (Disclaimer: As an Amazon Associate, ComicsXF may earn from qualifying purchases.)
Dan Grote is the editor and publisher of ComicsXF, having won the site by ritual combat. By day, he’s a newspaper editor, and by night, he’s … also an editor. He co-hosts The ComicsXF Interview Podcast with Matt Lazorwitz. He lives in New Jersey with his wife, two kids and two miniature dachshunds, and his third, fictional son, Peter Paul Winston Wisdom. Follow him @danielpgrote.bsky.social.
