4 out of 5

This is Prince being… pretty angry. I realize that Ice Cream Man is ostensibly a horror series – and I only use that adjective because the book has fiddled with humor and hope and aims for profundity in ways that has sometimes strayed from the initial depictions of life-is-a-horror-movie horrors – but ICM creator W. Maxwell Prince often masks his feelings behind much more general takes, so that the book can apply to The Many. And if / when he indulges in specifics, it’s to go on black humor tangents, or he’ll call himself out in some way for doing so, stacking 4th walls on top of each other. Some of that happens in this issue as well, but it’s more because there’s so much Prince wants to satirize about our current (2025) political state and how we’re being run by fail-upwards types that the story gets admittedly crowded with the images and snipes the writer wants us to see and hear; there’s a perfect version of this that goes through a pass to calm it down a little and just make the “loud” parts really loud. But the passion certainly comes through, and I’m in favor of it; I’m in favor of the version of Prince who has too much to say versus the version who gives us concepts and then backfills them with words – kind of overly clever Twilight Zone riffs that have become more frequent the longer the book has gone on; it is, surely, a difficult book to script for, given its loose lore and requirements to give us a standalone story each ish.

“Performance Review” highlights Craig, worker in a non-descript job at a generically named company, getting a performance review after… an incident with a chainsaw. It’s mostly a talky book, with Craig trading information with the CEO, but man is it pretty cutting at points – no pun intended – with little hitches that keep ramping up the disgust Prince feels for corporate culture (and, again, its ties into our day-to-day experience) in sharp, funny, and rings-of-truth ways. As mentioned, it’s also overstuffed, and maybe gives away the game a bit early, but an excellent example of how the open-ended nature of this series still allows for some great issues.

Artist Martin Morazzo is great at bringing liveliness to otherwise static scenes – like two people sitting, talking in a room – but some events here made me think that there hasn’t been too much of a call for gore in the series, and though it’s possible a key shot was purposefully sanitized, the way it’s presented makes me think maybe it was intended for shock (mixed with some slapstick), and it misses that mark a bit, still feeling sanitized.