4 out of 5

A “standard” Ice Cream Man issue by this point in the series (with advance pardons to W. Maxwell Prince and team for oversimplifying) will generally focus on the dissolution of a relationship of some form – a marriage, a job, etc. – with a scalable amount of lore references and meta nods to the writer and the reader. Setting aside a pretty regular frequency of non “standard” issues – ones that manage to still knock the wind out of ya’ – the levers that, to me, determine how effective the normal issues are are how relevant to the story both the references and nods are: often this becomes a pretty indulgent cycle of being self-referential, than Prince acknowledging the self-referentialness, and then the lead character’s life blows up and The End.

The Mortal Coil Shuffle essentially commits to pulling these levers to almost the fully open positions, with a family’s utter destruction – the husband is a gambling addict; the wife is depressed; the son is terminally ill – distracted by the appearance of quizzical characters who pose questions and / or say things that only really make sense in ICM parlance (referencing bugs and such), and Prince kind of forces some further narrative tics onto the thing to give it further synergies.

However… ‘The Moral Coil Shuffle’ is presented as a deck of cards, and not a comic book. A lot of those indulgences are given a cute jolt by focusing them around numbers and sequencing (particular to the format), and the story involves the format as well – making it more than just a gimmick – and the production on the cards is legit: thought was put into what the illustrations show / say versus the accompanying text; their numbered to keep it in order; they don’t feel like simple cardboard cutouts but could actually function as a deck if they had playing card faces; it’s all just such a fun idea / package and presented in a way very particular to ICM.

There’s a really difficult ask where the story could take place in any order, and I’m kind of sitting with how I feel about that – if there’s “meaning” to pull from that limitation – and ultimately the story told on the cards is affected by the lever-pulls mentioned, but what an inventive way to add new life to that formula.