2 out of 5

I’ll be harsh on this, because writer W. Maxwell Prince has kind of set the standard for the type of stories in Swan Songs with Ice Cream Man: that being one-shot, existential horror tales. ICM has kind of struggled as Prince has played with lore to greater and lesser extents, and occasional experiments that require forcing a story into a mold just because, but on the whole, it’s been both a fascinating (and affecting) process to experience, as well as a fantastic example of carving out your own niche. While Prince didn’t necessarily create the template, as I started, he’s now made the standard, and doing that has granted him an interesting amount of room and comfort in the book to play more casually with story.

The first non-spinoff / spinoff, HaHa, struggled to find its own tone, but, at the time, proved to be a clever way to butt at what I felt Prince was struggling with in the main title itself. Swan Songs is another non-spinoff / spinoff, in that it’s coded with Ice Cream Man-isms but doesn’t have to be connected, and it uses a slightly different framework: if ICM is the horror of the everyday, Swan Songs zooms to the end of the lives of its various protagonists, and questions if those lives were worth living. This is already a theme in ICM, I’d say, thus kind of repeating HaHa’s initial problem of not really clarifying why we’re buying a separate series; indeed, HaHa’s ultimate “joke” was that it couldn’t get away from Ice Cream Man.

While I don’t think Songs runs the same gambit, and it provided a good avenue for Prince to give other artists a chance at the formula – each issue features a different and truly gifted artist, all allowed quite a lot of leeway to do their own thing – almost every single book is of that “forced into a mold” variety, and doubly so because we have to cover a lot of ground to establish character and then give the end of their life / lives meaning. Adding the unique artist atop unfortunately underlines this further: each book is a hodgepodge of trying something new, but falling into similar traps. And man, the unevenness is frustrating, because some of the visual work is simply brilliant – I love the direction Alex Eckman-Lawn has taken their art, for example – and Prince is wonderful as a conceptualist, with each book containing at the very least an excellent premise, but he has to try so, so hard to get us there, and there’s a kind of naturalism at play in the dialogue that’s effected, often, as casual swears and pokes at poignancy that are… rough around the edges.

In short, I was rolling my eyes a lot, and the aforementioned Ice Cream Man-isms came across as unfortunate fan-service – like we can’t get away from the winking, which might’ve been the point of HaHa, but then feels rather tired to do the same here, where it’s furthermore unnecessary: tragedy is baked into the concept itself.

Prince has set the standard for tales of this nature. I support his continual efforts of reconstructing the borders of what that looks like, I suppose I just also want a separate series to either add something to ICM or to be its own thing, and Swan Songs doesn’t achieve either one of those.