By Zack Quaintance — Look, I know I’ve heaped just a ton of praise on Ice Cream Man in the past two years or so that the book has been coming out. As such, I know some of you may be tired of hearing it or are simply tuning me out. Still. If just one new reader comes to this book because of something I write about it, I think continuing to praise this comic is worthwhile. It’s just that good, and, somehow, it also continues to get better.

For the uninitiated, Ice Cream Man is an anthology cosmic/existential horror series that each month gives us a mostly-new set of characters, with the titular (sinister) ice cream man making cameos and serving as a through line in each tale. There are some other folks who show up multiple times here and there, but, make no mistake, as the title implies this is the ice cream man’s show. And the ice cream man is an effective device here, evoking as he does clean and wholesome ordinary happiness on the outside, while proving to be absolutely horrifying when given a closer look. It’s really a metaphor for the type of stories this comic has been telling for 16 issues now.

And what type of stories does this comic tell? Well, here in Ice Cream Man #16 we get a great representative example of a fear, a concern, a worst-case scenario that seems to have sprung directly from the psyche of writer W. Maxwell Prince. In this story, a single father breaks down and reads his teenage daughter’s diary, which starts by playing to a father’s concern about his daughter becoming sexually active (played tastefully). From there, the story does what this comic does best and extrapolates it to a terrifying yet logical place likely to live somewhere deep within most of its audience. 

It’s a poignant and chilling way not to just explore these characters and this exact situation, but society and its values as a whole. What’s even more impressive is just how consistently this book continues to do all of that without ever once feeling trite or repetitive. In addition to Prince’s scripting and themes, major credit is of course owed to the artists of this comic — Martin Morazzo who is colored by Chris O’Halloran. Morazzo’s work in this book, no matter how horrifying things get, remains rooted in deep humanity. Another (perhaps better) way to put that is that I’m not sure there’s another working comics artist today who could alternate between the mundane and fantastically dark as well as Morazzo does in every issue of this book. O’Halloran’s color work, meanwhile, matches him through every story beat, teasing out both normalcy and dark horrors, with letterer Good Old Neon serving as the unsung rhythm section of the whole thing.

So yes, in summation, this issue is very very good, just like the rest of this series to date.

Overall: Ice Cream Man #16 is yet another stand-alone story that starts with a common fear and finds a dark place that speaks to cracks in society as a whole. Simply put, this is one of our best monthly comics, and I’d recommend it to anyone. 9.8/10

Ice Cream Man #16
Writer: W. Maxwell Prince
Artist: Martin Morazzo
Colorist: Chris O’Halloran
Letterer: Good Old Neon
Publisher: Image Comics
Price: $3.99

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Zack Quaintance is a tech reporter by day and freelance writer by night/weekend. He Tweets compulsively about storytelling and comics as Comics Bookcase.