Ice Cream Man Sundae Edition Volume One (2022)
Reprints Ice Cream Man #1-12
Written by W. Maxwell Prince
Art by Chris O’Halloran & Martin Morazzo
Image Comics is one of the most dramatically transformed companies in the industry. It began as an escape hatch for popular Marvel artists of the time to gain independence, and the stories focused mainly on superhero types; specifically, it felt like every title attempted to mimic Spider-Man or the X-Men, most but not all. Today, Image is a place where comics creators can get their start with concepts they own, or veterans can shift from the big two and develop stories that neither DC nor Marvel would be interested in.
Ice Cream Man is one of the strange titles I could see finding a footing at Vertigo (if DC hadn’t discontinued it in 2020). The series is a fascinating mix of horror anthology and serialized storytelling, something Alan Moore gave a masterclass on his Swamp Thing run, a book I am sure W. Maxwell Prince has studied.
Despite being the title character, the Ice Cream Man remains a background figure for most of this book until the last few issues. He’s a neighborhood purveyor of frozen treats in an unnamed American town. It’s not just the Ice Cream Man who is up to twisted things; everyone in this place seems to have lost touch with reality and is capable of committing horrific acts or having terrifying hallucinations.
The most disturbing thing we see in the first issue is not the title character but a little boy casually coming home to the rotting corpses of his parents, frozen in a twisted rictus at the kitchen table. The local police are also getting reports of a strange man-beast roaming the woods, which is revealed in this first issue as the Ice Cream. He’s a werewolf?
That issue ends with the boy’s narrative resolved, but many more questions are raised about the Ice Cream Man, which leads into the following issue, where we’re presented with another seemingly mundane yet tragic scenario. A woman looks for whatever cash she can find to score a hit of heroin for her and her boyfriend. He’s become unresponsive laying on the couch of their dingy home, and she thinks a little smack could get them back.
In her head, she makes promises of rehab, but they just need this last one, a very common justification addicts make to themselves. This is paralleled with another couple, an elderly one wherein the husband requires constant care but doesn’t show much gratitude to his wife. Eventually, these two stories collide due to interference from the Ice Cream Man and have tragic conclusions.
And so goes the structure for most of the book: Introduce a character, outline their difficult situation, and watch them make horrible decisions egged on by the Ice Cream Man, whether directly or indirectly, tragedy strikes. The book is filled with some intensely horrific imagery, but nothing I would consider wildly over the top. There’s a pacing that hints at a larger story being told. Around a third of the way in, we get an issue that is just an all-out assault on the reader: a world gone completely mad with people doing horrific things to each other. By the end of that one, we briefly glimpse a mysterious stranger in black who will become increasingly more prominent. Eventually, we’ll learn he and the Ice Cream Man have been at odds for a long time and across multiple universes.
After this, we get a clever story titled Neapolitan where, like the ice cream, three things happen simultaneously. We follow a man who makes a series of decisions that split into three timelines, two of which end horrifically. The only one that turns out good is when he does the bad thing; it’s not violent, but he decides to take something that isn’t his, and his life turns out good. I can see the writer reflecting on the times we live in, the contradictions of existence in America versus the lessons we are taught as children. Evil people seem to succeed in that society, while those who try to be helpers and do good rarely get a moment to breathe. Ice Cream Man is not a hopeless comic but very thematically dark.
At a certain point, I thought this was just a horror anthology with a recurring Devil figure. Yet, the last couple of issues revealed Ice Cream Man is more than that. A larger narrative is threaded throughout about a conflict between manifestations of good and evil. We also have it strongly hinted that we haven’t been reading stories from the same reality this whole time. It can be inferred that off-panel, many of the realities we’ve seen have been chewed up and spit out by Ice Cream Man’s manipulations. I went into the book with moderate expectations and enjoyed myself more than anticipated. I look forward to reading and reviewing the second Sundae Edition in 2024.
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