3 out of 5

Ignore my rating for a moment and acknowledge: W. Maxwell Prince is the most exciting thing to happen in comics for a danged while.  You can take your Tom King and go fuss with your overwrought sense of meaning; Jeff Lemiere and Charles Soule can trade their indie brownie points for their Big Two plotting styles; Brian Vaughan can write the same character and story over and over again.  Meanwhile, Prince has rescued the ghost of Morrison from the rubble upon which  the latter had started re-building the DC Universe; I still dig Morrison, but – as I’ve commented a million and one times elsewhere – ever since he moved past the more personal worlds of Invisibles and Filth and expanded his consciousness to the universe, his stories have remained (generally) interesting, but not necessarily as grabbing as they once were.  Prince carries the WTF torch proudly, and seems to weight it down with psychological contemplations instead of Grant’s psychotropic ones, leading to potentially weightier material…

That said, he still hasn’t quite proven that he can hang it all together from beginning to end of a series or arc.  Grant, for all his bluster, creates everything for his reader wholesale, somehow able to carry us through confusion for pages and pages and issues.  I admire that W. Maxwell would rather offer some explanation or logic, but he steps in a bit too forcefully.  Not via exposition, per se – he’s not handing this stuff to us on a plate – but he takes open-ended ideas and winds them toward soundbyte-laden conclusions.  And I just wish he had more faith in the strength of what he builds prior to that to know that the work would seem that much more bold and subversive if he was more willing to leave his reader hanging with the pieces scattered for them to put together on their lonesome.

In Ice Cream Man, four down-on-their-lucks in a smalltown are visited by a chipper man – who appears on billboards, an on TV ads with oddly violent jingles – in the eponymous role, offered a special flavor to cheer their moods.  But, like the ‘be careful what you wish for’ myths of old, often their thoughts or actions are steered toward ruinous or depressive results.  Now take that idea, and make it much less obvious, much creepier, arted with Frank Quitely fine-lineness by Martín Morazzo, gloriously psychedelically-tinged colored by Chris O’Halloran, and lettered in a well-chosen blend of dreamy, float fonts and bubbles by Good Old Neon, and you have a goddamn fantastically fascinating book.  …For three issues.  Issue four is that wrap up concept, that expands a bit on the Ice Cream Man mythos and doesn’t exactly fit into the structure introduced previously.  Or rather, it adds structure where the first three books didn’t clearly follow the ‘wishmaster perverts your wish’ trope; three issues’ characters interact with the Ice Cream Man and moreso have their realities twisted, but you can wander between their actions to suss out just how their lives may have been nudged afoul.

And issue four is by no means a travesty or a huge derailment, it just, again, sheds a bit more light on to things and adds some borders, and it no longer feels as potentially huge and weird.  Then again, I think this is Prince’s first ongoing, so I’m eager to see what happens when he doesn’t have to hit a hard stop at a mini-series’ conclusion.

So ignore the rating.  Amidst all the rather similar shite that gets hyped by the internet machines, there’s suddenly a writer poking around in some madly exciting territory.  Get here now.