5 out of 5

Ice Cream Man bounces back pretty quickly.

After the somewhat repetitive feeling of last issue’s structure and story (although multiversity comics had a much better review than mine, commenting more effectively on themes and the art, though coming to the same overall conclusion regarding quality), W. Maxwell Prince, Martin Morazzo, colorist Chris O’Halloran and letterer Good Old Neon give us another standalone slice of horror, but it feels like an actual story with character this time, and not just an exercise in fitting something to match a concept.

Lillian has seemingly inherited madness from her mother, chattering away in the asylum about boys with balloons, and coats, and missing fingers…  We flash back to ‘Before,’ during which she brusquely exits a dinner date, only to find that her parka isn’t at the coat check.  Ice Cream Man is there, though, ready to give her an ICM branded jacket instead.  It’s not hers, but ‘it’s the only one’ there.  Lillian takes it with shoulder shrugging abandon.  And then we start to see the source of her mutterings on balloons and fingers.

When ICM started out, it seemed to follow a theme of exposing each issues’ characters’ inner fears, as encouraged or embellished by the appearance of our titular scaremonger.  As its gone on, its seemed confused sometimes, occasionally shallowly or cruelly picking at its featured players more from a top-down perspective than an internal one.  This is sort of why Issue 14 didn’t quite work, as it took a more generic “problem” of the mystique of wedded bliss and explored it with two shell characters.  Coat Check Story might not have a lot of room to explain Gillian’s whole existence to us, but we know her; we know this feeling of empowerment that masks other things.  Prince speaks to this in a brief scene with Lillian and her psychologist, setting up the issue’s horrific takedown of identity, with the random symbolism – dead birds, bugs, creepy kids – not feeling especially random, but relevant to Lillian’s decaying sanity.  It’s a haunting issue, bringing ICM back to being one of the most affecting, complex books on the rack.