4 out of 5

I don’t know that this issue necessarily exemplified any ICM themes – it feels like a spin-off of the series, taking a tagline (‘This is not going to end well’) and crafting a very tangential tale around it – and I don’t know that its lore nods advance the slowly churning background story at all, but: damn, Prince, Morazzo, O’Hallouran, and GON – I’ll take more of these issues.

Billed pretty cleanly as a Graham Greene swipe up front, Spy Story is totally not that, just pulling some general tone and spy tropes wholly into the twisted horrors of the Ice Cream-verse. Only, as mentioned, not exactly, because this functions pretty exactly like a spy thriller, albeit with odd Twin Peaks-adjacent tones which are never out of place in this ‘verse. I find that mash-up very refreshing, and I’d take that as a way to revitalize the series – the official Ice Cream Man as a horror host or Rod Serling type, even, popping in to observe some strange, issue-at-a-time tale. Yeah, you could say that’s what we’re doing now, but Prince’s pushing for life-affirming profundity or self-defeating cynical takes undermines things the more he’s kinda beaten those drums; stepping back and just doing tonal takes feels like it puts us closer to how the series began.

That this takes place in Cuba highlights a bit of a limitation for Morazzo – all of these characters end up looking similar, just with a different skin tone (not that everyone from one area has distinctive physical features, but it just drew my attention to the fact that a lot of his figures could be the same person); at the same time, he nails the international adventure vibe, and the setting seemed to give him a kind of more cinematic pacing the book doesn’t often use, and it looked good.

A very fun extension of the series.