Comic Info
Comic Name: Ice Cream Man
Publisher: Image Comics
Writer: W. Maxwell Prince
Artist: Martin Morazzo
# of Issues: 4
Release Date: 2022
Ice Cream Man #25 Variant
Reprints Ice Cream Man #25-28 (August 2021-January 2022). The Ice Cream Man is back with tales of mystery and terror. The last moments for a commercial airline as it crashes to the ground. A man explores his family tree from the top branches to the roots and beyond. A cockroach finds himself turned into a man…and is trapped as a bug in a man’s world. An etymologist seeks out the ultimate word and instead learns the power of words can be deadly.
Written by W. Maxwell Prince, Ice Cream Man Volume 7: Certain Descents is an Image Comics horror/sci-fi anthology collection. Following Ice Cream Man Volume 6: Just Desserts, the collection features art by Martin Morazzo.
Ice Cream Man might be my favorite discovery during the pandemic. With a lot of buzz, I didn’t actually have a lot of hope. It feels like a lot of those buzzy books don’t hit the mark and are instead a bit of a drag. Each volume of Ice Cream Man proves that idea wrong.
The biggest problem with Ice Cream Man is that you hate for each volume to end. With short four issue runs and issues that sometimes are rather minimal on words, the series is a quick read. Each issue bring you something new and a twist, but the weirdness carries a unifying theme that resonates through the whole series.
Ice Cream Man #27
The series also hints at a bigger storyline. My least favorite of the collections mostly deals with the past of the Ice Cream Man, but this volume handles things better by injecting the Riccardus story throughout the issues. This collection starts to introduce a story of Riccardus (aka the Ice Cream Man) on trial in some far-flung future. It is presented as a back-up story in Ice Cream Man #25 and is touched on again in Ice Cream Man #28…but not fully explained. It is obtuse enough that you want to find the mystery.
Another fun issue in this collection has to be the reverse of Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis where a cockroach wakes up a man. The idea of people being bugs and how a bug would perceive our world is interesting, but in classic Ice Cream Man fashion, it does end rather quickly since you want to wrap up the story for the issue.
Ice Cream Man Volume 7: Certain Descents is another fun collection in a series that has endless potential. Ice Cream Man is a great take on The Twilight Zone format. It brings ethical questions, horror, science-fiction, and an enigmatic “host” that has secrets himself. If you still haven’t checked out Ice Cream Man, get yourself a scoop. Ice Cream Man 7: Certain Descents is followed by Ice Cream Man 8: Subjects & Objects.
Preceded By:
Ice Cream Man 6: Just Desserts
Followed By:
