3 out of 5

The best Ice Cream Man issues, to me, are subtle, or at least favor subtlety. Maxwell W. Prince’s ongoing study of evil-in-the-everyday – wound around the vaguest mythology concerning its titular “lead” – works when it creeps, with oddities at the corners of stories while the feeling of something being wrong eventually takes over. 

This issue is not that. And while it struggles, as many ICM issues do, out of an adherence to various structural / narrative devices Prince employs, it’s also a very honest issue, and provides for a solid read. 

Here, we alternate, Sliding Doors style, between the story our narrator wishes he could write – Brad’s great day of a meet-cute and an adventure, told in color – and the story he ends up writing – Brad’s same-as-every-other crappy day of a floundering hookup and a tragedy, told in black and white. Because Prince is doing a voiceover the whole while, beyond the mirroring of scenes, he also mirrors the narration (i.e. “In the story I wish I could write…” and “In the story I actually write…” a few panels later), inevitably leading to a bit of repetition; a shtick that works, but that you’ve then locked yourself into it for all twenty pages. It’s still interesting to see the dual Brads, and the confessional aspect is engaging – when Prince talks to us, the reader, about this very comic book – but it’s unfortunately one of those setups that you get right away, and don’t necessarily discover much more as it goes along, despite some cute scenes where Prince changes up the pacing a bit. 

Because of how well this summarizes the meta style of the series, though, I feel like it’s an excellent jumping on issue – a perfect oner to hand someone as an indication of what to expect, and also a way to show how different some comics can be, which perhaps fulfills an opening nod from Prince’s to Watchmen, which is the universal benchmark book to give to a non comics reader as proof of the medium’s potential.