5 out of 5

Writing Ice Cream Man has to be difficult. I mean, any comic written is an accomplishment, but setting aside some work-for-hire style filler and assuming a writer cares, you can break your story down into arcs, and then those arcs down into logical pieces which comprise your issues, and that gives you some guidelines. And if you’re working with someone else’s property, that overall story arc may already have some guidelines. On the flipside, if you’re working on an anthology entry or a single drop-in, the concept is the same, just the scale (the page length) is different: break it down, beginning-middle-end. None of this is easy, but I can imagine how you can give yourself a template of sorts.

And ICM has a template, yes, except that it’s also a series somewhat based around breaking (or playing with) those templates, and writer / creator W. Maxwell Prince has also made a habit of / made it a platform for challenging his own writerly indulgences. Also: it is its own anthology, with a loose-limbed ongoing narrative that matters and doesn’t; each issue stands alone but has to feel part of the whole. That would be difficult for one writer to oversee, with other creators contributing; how about one writer writing the whole thing, which has now his 45 issues of, essentially, one-shot stories (okay, I think there was a two-parter in there), each of which must not repeat their themes or stylistic tics without awareness, and which should contribute to the whole while also standing on their own. Also also, you’ve got jerks like me around the internet, poking and prodding at your efforts all the while.

Prince made this damn hard on himself, and even if he’d ended it at issue # whatever prior to this one, I would’ve been impressed. But this deep in, he still drops some awesome bombs into the mix – much more regularly than any writer should be allowed, meaning he’s sucking up a larger share from the creative pool than he should! – and issue #45 is… amazing. It may be one of the best books Prince has written, period. It does all of the life-is-horror drama Ice Cream Man should, with its casual world-lore nods, and gives Prince his indulgences via excessive Hitchcock references, but those references are baked in to the meta of the book, which gets to be an obsessive worrywart on… art? On how we readers participate in this cycle of obsession and commercialism? On how the writer is sucked into the obsession willingly, or maybe they’re just plain crazy?

My god, I don’t know. But this one hit me in a way I always want horror books to, by making me feel complicit in the experience; Martin Morazzo and Chris O’Halloran really push themselves to hit notes between their “standard,” reliable pairing and more cinematic and painterly and experimental moments.