Comic Info
Comic Name: Ice Cream Man
Publisher: Image Comics
Writer: W. Maxwell Prince
Artist: Martin Morazzo
# of Issues: 4
Release Date: 2020
Ice Cream Man #17
Reprints Ice Cream Man #17-20 (January 2020-August 2020). If you are good, the Ice Cream Man might tell you a story…but he might tell you one even if you aren’t. An intrepid reporter at the Every World paper thinks there is something wrong with the city’s hero Ice Cream Man and intends to prove it. A man suffering from Alzheimer’s sees his world slowly disappearing at the hands of a gremlin who has no sense of sentimentality. A boy named Casper goes through life feeling like a ghost and haunted by something he saw as a child. Plus, the Ice Cream Man provides some bedtime stories for children.
Written by W. Maxwell Prince, Ice Cream Man Volume 5: Other Confections is an Image Comics anthology series. Following Ice Cream Man Volume 4: Tiny Lives, the collection features art by Martin Morazzo.
Ice Cream Man thus far has been a pretty wild ride. There are issues that really hit the target and there are issues that falter…the fact that the series is anthology allows for missed targets and the occasion so-so collection. Ice Cream Man 5: Other Confections is easily my favorite of the series thus far.
The series continues to take interesting dives into material that you wouldn’t think of exploring. The first story is another post-modern take on Superman (which isn’t necessarily original), but Ice Cream Man keeps it fresh. What is also fun within the context of the anthology is other stories popping up within Ice Cream Man issues and this entry has a lot of appearances by other Ice Cream Man characters and items.
The second story features a rather insightful look at the idea of memory loss by exploring what might be locked inside of a person who is suffering from it. The man believes he is being haunted by a gremlin that takes the memories from him…he could be right…he could be wrong, but regardless, it will end the same way. It doesn’t truly matter if it is an illusion or not.
Ice Cream Man #20 Variant
The third story looks at the idea of people who feel like they go through life unseen. Witnessing a suicide, leads the boy named Casper (which feeds into his belief) to believe that he is unseen and unloved. The fact that his marriage is falling apart and his job is a dead end piles on these feelings, but after a life after feeling invisible, he realizes he did touch people.
The final entry in the series has a lot of fun by doing an “Ice Cream Man Take” on the classic stories Goodnight Moon, The Giving Tree, and Green Eggs and Ham. It would be easy to completely take them a horrific direction, but the series slyly makes them off enough that they feel wrong, but not crazy enough to make them feel like the absurd (with Weed Laced with Coke coming closest to the absurd but adapting a story with logic already twisted). It is an eerie tale in that I can recall sometimes being unnaturally scared by books that weren’t meant to be scary as a kid…including The Giving Tree which dealt with death and loss.
Ice Cream Man 5: Other Confections shows what this series is capable of and just is fun to read. The only unfortunate thing about Ice Cream Man is the small doses of the collections, but powering down twenty issues of Ice Cream Man in a sitting would feel like you were wasting the series as well. Instead you get to savor each “bite” of Ice Cream Man and await the next issue or volume. Ice Cream Man 5: Other Confections is followed by Ice Cream Man 6: Just Desserts.
Related Links:
Ice Cream Man 1: Rainbow Sprinkles
Ice Cream Man 2: Strange Neapolitan
