Assorted Crisis Events #3 – A Tale Of Two Hearths

Assorted Crisis Events #3 asks the question and explores the morality of what might happen if the were two multiple Earths and the inhabitants were forced to live with each other on a single Earth. This is a meaty exploration of this in a story that spans 40 pages full of a breathtaking and thought-provoking story and top-notch art and colors.

Camp does an excellent excellent job of framing the story in the first few pages: a normal town, but on two different Earths, which are very much alike with subtle changes to differentiate them from each other but still unique and analogous, much like the Pre Crisis On Infinite Earths DCU.

When one of the Earths (Hearth-Two) is destroyed, the inhabitants of the Hearth-Two make the journey to Hearth-One, where at first they are welcomed with open arms, but things, as these things tend to do both in fiction and the real world, take a turn for the worse, with no “winner” in the end. Camp takes his time to explore multiple relationships such as a family meeting their doppelganger, survivors of Hearth-Two meeting Heath-One loved ones who died, and the various social-economic-political situations that would likely arise with there being an influx of displaced peoples.

Camp uses established multiversal tropes such a the different Hearths vibrating on slightly different frequencies, people imitating their other Hearth counterparts, and the effects of such a crisis event might have on an almost idealic society. Camp also does a wonderful job of working in current real world events and issues into the narrative without being heavy handed. It is also nice to see that the “Where’s Waldo” of the old man with his sign hearlding a Crisis afoot continues in this issue, giving some common thread to these individual stories.

The art and colorwork continue to be top-notch.  Eric Zawadzki does an excellent job, especially with facial expressions and subtle differences to the same people from the different Hearths. Bellaire