LogFAQs > #945729373

91. Ice Cream Man (Character / Comic Series) (14.5 points)
Nominated by: Pirateking2000 (2/5 remaining)
https://imgur.com/a/U1EeuRX

Importance: 2.5
Fear: 5
Snake: 7

Ice Cream Man is the breath-of-fresh air I think I really needed. This is a fantastic book that invokes & homages 50s era horror anthology comics like Tales from the Crypt or The Vault of Horror, basically anything from the EC Comics brand, mixed with a dash of Twilight Zone & a whole bottle of Stephen King. Disparately, Ice Cream Man is an anthology series, however, the books build up a collective tissue with a few recurring characters, with the titular ICM at the fringes of every story, typically involved in kicking off the plot by serving up a brand of ice cream that triggers an emotional reaction or repressed desire in its protagonists' lives. He's like a twisted version of Rod Serling, the horror host with actual pull & will on peoples' lives he simply sees as pawns in a grand plan beyond our comprehension. The artwork throughout the series is supreme, Martin Morazzo and Chris O'Halloran have a style that I feel invokes Steve Dillon's fantastic work on books like Preacher & Punisher, a clean, grounded look that packs in a lot of emotion but also has the added bonus of making the horror somehow more unnatural, deformed & disturbing. As the series continues on, panel layouts become a lot more creative & the stories more original. One of my favorites is issue #6, depicting a young man purchasing a triple scoop ice cream from our white-clad villain protagonist. The young man's life splits into three separate timelines as we are shown three different paths he takes home, each color coded and thematically similar, but how each affects his life varies wildly. It lacks any dialogue, the art carries the story and it's both a loving & tragic depiction of how our lives can be so altered by serendipity, and that no matter how perfect or imperfect a situation may seem, there's a chance our lives can be upended or shattered into a million pieces from something we never see coming.

Ice Cream Man is an amazing book. It's a comic that carries an undeniably nihilistic tone, but it's a book so unafraid to delve into humanity's flaws, failures, and unrealized dreams that I respect the absolute hell of it. It will almost never have you come out of an issue feeling good about anything, and some readers won't be in to that for sure, but sometimes we need that sobering reminder that life isn't all sunshine, sometimes things don't work out, that we do have those flaws, and that hell, we're here and we might as well try it anyway. Ice Cream Man is a scoop of delicious chocolate ice cream well worth tasting.

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Is this girl the cat or is she the canary?
https://imgur.com/1e1e70S - https://imgur.com/XObpAjw