Comic Info
Comic Name: Ice Cream Man
Publisher: Image Comics
Writer: W. Maxwell Prince
Artist: Martin Morazzo
# of Issues: 4
Release Date: 2018
Ice Cream Man #5
Reprints Ice Cream Man #5-8 (July 2018-October 2018). The ice cream business is booming…and with it comes a strange man who seems to have horrible tales pop-up all around him…or is he an it? Be a man committing suicide by leaping from the top a building while inside other horrors lurk, the butterfly effect on a man with three very different timelines, a little girl facing the death of her friend, or a couple of paramedics more interesting in the hospital’s pill supply than the patients. Stop by and have a scoop on the Ice Cream Man!
Written by W. Maxwell Prince, Ice Cream Man Volume 2: Strange Neapolitan is an Image Comics anthology comic book series. Following Ice Cream Man Volume 1: Rainbow Sprinkles, the series features art by Martin Morazzo and continues to receive positive reviews.
I came to Ice Cream Man rather late. I passed the episodes on the shelf and liked the covers but never took the dive…I wish I hadn’t waited. As a fan of anthologies like The Twilight Zone and Black Mirror, Ice Cream Man is right up my alley…and Ice Cream Man 2: Strange Neapolitan continues to offer good stories with a strange web beginning to coat the entire town.
Primarily the series is an anthology. This means if you don’t like one issue, you potentially could like the next issue…it is a win-win as a reader because you cannot anticipate what will come next since the stories are random and generally on the horrific or science-fiction side. Maxwell is able to play a lot with the storytelling process as a result and the series’ potential is endless.
Ice Cream Man #8
The biggest fault with Ice Cream Man is that the collections are so short. With four issues and a series that can say a lot with few words (as seen in the “Strange Neapolitan” issue), you can rip through it in a speed run even if you are analyzing and exploring the panels…it is kind of a painful trip when you reach the end of each issue because you know you are one step closer to finishing the short book.
The aspect that isn’t talked about as much in Ice Cream Man is the overarching story. Ice Cream Man was presented to me as a straight anthology, but that isn’t the case. There are threads of different stories carrying over issue to issue. A werewolf referenced in the first issue appears again in this collection, the same is with the deadly spider…which of course is a reward to regular readers. It also begins to paint a bigger story involving the Ice Cream Man and Caleb which is starting to play out more in this volume.
Ice Cream Man is a series that I will keep reading simply because it is odd and different than a lot of comic book titles out there. The art is solid and the stories are interesting. I’m sure eventually there will be bigger collections or an omnibus of the series, but I can’t wait that long…Ice Cream Man is like getting a hit, and I need my fix. Ice Cream Man 2: Strange Neapolitan is followed by Ice Cream Man 3: Hopscotch Mélange.
Related Links:
Ice Cream Man 1: Rainbow Sprinkles
Ice Cream Man 3: Hopscotch Mélange
