Have You Read This? The Ice Cream Man series

Scott McCloud, author of Understanding Comics, beautifully illustrates the difference between genre and medium using a pitcher. The medium, like the pitcher, merely contains the ideas put into it. He uses this also to illustrate how comics and graphic novels aren’t just for children, or simply “less” than books without pictures. Using panels of pictures to tell a story, McCloud argues, isn’t just for kids. Rather, it depends on the content, of the sophistication of the ideas explored through those panels. Some horror aficionados may say that graphics in horror strip away the unknown, a definite appeal to horror, according to Lovecraft, thus denying the reader the opportunity to imagine the monster rendered there on the page, but there are comics and graphic novels that incorporate the medium in new and exciting ways to grab the audience by the throat and keep them terrified. An example of this is the Ice Cream Man series, by W. Maxwell Price, with art by talents like Martin Morazzo, and Chris Halloran, is one such example.

This series isn’t about one story; rather, it’s a Twilight-Zone like journey through multiple tales of weirdness. All these tales are linked through the titular Ice Cream Man, who changes from a Rod Serling or Cryptkeeper kind of character that introduces these tales to actually inflicting misery on these poor souls. The later volumes give readers a glimpse into his bizarre and otherworldly backstory, but the real joy of this series is the straight-up originality and sheer variety of the stories and how they are told. Here are some of the wilder examples:

1. A one-hit wonder who finds his purpose when he helps a group of song titles liberate their domain (You read that right, song titles).
2.   A man somehow lives three different timelines, finding three times the tragedy, madness, and burdening knowledge of the human experience. 
3. Dog brain surgeons. Not surgeons who operate on dogs, but dogs who are little brain surgeons. They wear scrubs and everything.  
4. A man trapped in a neverending lineup of demented reality television. 
5.  A space adventure at the end of humanity’s existence.

There are also some more down-to-earth, traditional horror dealing with subjects like drug addiction and a child’s first encounter with death, but they still greatly utilize images to tell their story and tug on the readers’ heartstrings. Like any good salesman of frozen treats, the Ice Cream Man has all sorts of flavors, whether you’re into vanilla hauntings or prefer a butter pecan existential dread.