Summertime is the time for water games in the backyard, day-long visits to the amusement park, and chilly rocket pops from your neighborhood ice cream man. But summertime is also the time to ready oneself for the chilling spooky season that is just around the corner, and one of Image Comics’ horror series — Ice Cream Man, written by W. Maxwell Prince & illustrated by Martin Morazzo — is ready to serve up any deadly delicacy — & more! — that you can imagine.
Simply know that the just desserts come with a price.
Collecting the series’ first eight issues in two paperback volumes — ‘Rainbow Sprinkles’ and ‘Strange Neapolitan,’ respectively — Ice Cream Man captures the subjective terror that haunted TV audiences in programs like Tales from the Darkside and The Twilight Zone.
In the most unsettling nightmares, one comes to accept the terms of the immediate dream world, as implausible as they may seem. One’s survival sometimes depends upon something as obvious as fleeing a deadly assailant — sometimes, upon the seemingly rational act of setting fire to a skyscraper constructed out of goldfish.
Nightmares are unpredictable in their logic, and Ice Cream Man revels in the same bizarre, Lynchian-laced realities in which its stories evolve.
The series’ nightmares — told in an (at least for now) anthologized style of storytelling that infrequently (at least for now) connects the singular narratives & their characters — play with the reader’s psyche in a similar fashion. And here, the citizens of a small town are quietly assaulted by an ice cream man who seems both to appeal to their immediate need for sugary sustenance and to subject them to the absolute pit of their lives.
In these stories, a suicide from many, many stories above the pavement below counts out his transgressions as gravity counts down the moments to his death. A musician hopes to strike gold with another #1 single and is transported to a dimension where popular music sets more than simple atmosphere. An addict is meant to choose the needle or the damage that it’s done, only to understand the lengths that she will go in order to find bliss.
These are just some of the victims of the ice cream man whose machinations also seem to threaten the entire community, building a foundation of terror as yet to be fully realized.
The central foundation that gives the series its structural strengths is Prince’s writing and Morazzo’s artwork. The pairing works together like the very best left-of-center work by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely: just unsettling enough in the DNA of its prose that the visual tattoos on the surface of the skin will give one an even greater reason for apprehensive pause.
But the most delectable ingredient of the series’ allure is in the invitation that it offers to its audience: treacherous treats await you if you’re brave enough to place an order at the vendor’s window, but some patience is also required. (By and large, the only constant from one story to the next is the ice cream man himself — the series’ villain, possessed with the ability to saturate his confectionary cones with all manner of emotional, physical, and psychological torment — and, in subsequent stories, the mysterious adversary who means to stop him.) Over the course of the first eight issues, the creators aren’t quick to provide many answers — that a conspiracy of terror threatens to destroy this small town, that a universal Heavenly (or Hellish) plot connects these monthly tragedies with some grand purpose that at least for now goes unexplained — but the mystery of a ghoulish endgame doesn’t appear to be on the menu’s placard.
And just as the Universal monster motion pictures ultimately concluded their tales of terror in a little more than an hour and returned audiences to the inescapable (if more man-made, more manageable, more muted) horror of the Great Depression, the horror that embraces the reader within the pages of Ice Cream Man is unrelenting insomuch that even when the final page is turned, the seemingly innocuous magazine returns you to a world in which these psychological and societal monsters still exist.
Yes, the monsters of most horror films return, when the credits roll, to their crypts, to their unique circles of Hell, to the confines of a metal film canister.
But the monsters of mediocrity and mortality — both “creatures,” among others, that plague the protagonists of this series to the point of death — are not so easily returned to a genie’s bottle, and these monsters have the stamina to haunt and destroy us with much more ease than a mummified man or a gill man or a wolf man (though the outskirts of Ice Cream Man appear to be haunted by the latter of these as well).
Cinematic monsters live on the big screen. They have for more than a century.
Real world monsters live next door, in the closet, under the pillow, under your nose.
In fact, they flourish there.
They have done so since, one would imagine, the beginning of time.
If the ice cream man offers a delicious treat imbued with your darkest fear — perhaps a fear that you want to face, more than likely a fear that you need to face, without a doubt a fear that you will face — know that there is no respite from the anxiety you’re about to ingest.
As Nietzsche wrote of staring into the abyss — here, what the reader consumes will likewise consume the reader.
It seems the only goal intended to satiate the reader on these blistering summer days, because the hot, hot heat isn’t the only thing capable of stopping the heart from time to time.
There’s a flavor for everyone’s suffering, as Ice Cream Man intones early on in the series.
And we’re all connected through the suffering.
So what will you have on this unseasonably warm day?
We haven’t seen a day as hot as this one in a long time, one that is about to experience a
true
cold
SNAP.
Caveat emptor.
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Justin Howard Query graduated from the University of Iowa with a Masters of Arts in Teaching Secondary Education and has taught English & journalism for the past 15 years in Oswego, IL, where he is also sponsor of the school’s student (oehowl.org) news magazine, the recipient of state & national awards for the past 10 years. Personally, he has not won a single award for the content that he posts (@transl8edpoorly) on Twitter.
