It’s a hot summer day, and you are a kid in an American suburb, riding your bike along the rows of identical houses and perfect, manicured lawns. When you hear the music—a cheerful, jingling tune—your mouth starts to water. You take a shortcut to follow the sound, because you know what the looping melody means: The ice cream truck is here!
Buying a cone could be a happy memory with tinges of nostalgia and longing for the carefree childhood, and for most people it probably is. Now, imagine that the scoops of your Neapolitan are filled with worms and the ice cream man is an evil monster “who might be the devil, or might be a god, or might be nothing at all.” He’s “doing his best to convince us that there’s no hope” by manipulating our lives, adding suffering, murder, and havoc to our already joyless existence, making the “bugs” in our heads—loneliness, regret, addiction, boredom, self-sabotage—writhe, squirm, and multiply.
If any of this sounds intriguing, then the Ice Cream Man comic book series by writer W. Maxwell Prince, artist Martín Morazzo, and colorist Chris O’Halloran is the right fit for you. It’s an anthology of psychological horror with elements of dark humor that pays special attention to language and word play, allusions to literature and music, and grotesque imagery in upbeat, warm colors. Each chapter tells a new story, often experimental in voice, style, form, or genre. The tenth and most recent volume of the figglybumps storyline, Imperious Wrecks, came out in 2024. In anticipation of Volume 11 coming out this September, I’d like to review all four chapters from Volume 10, which will also serve as excellent examples of what to expect from the whole series for those unfamiliar with it.
The themes of death, pain, grief, and ruined families are common for Ice Cream Man, and the first chapter of Volume 10, “Flight of the Figglybumps,” is not an exception. It’s a story of two siblings, Grace and Mike, sorting out their brother Brian’s basement after he committed suicide. The second plot line in the chapter comes from the cartoon Brian created and features fluffy rabbit-like creatures, figglybumps. Readers of Ice Cream Man have seen them in previous volumes but didn’t then have much context for where figglybumps come from and what they are. Just like all the other chapters, “Flight of the Figglybumps” can be enjoyed as a stand-alone piece, but to get the most out of the series, you might also want to check previous volumes, especially “Cape Fear” (Volume 5, Chapter 17), which sheds light on what happened to figglybumps after their acquaintance with the ice cream man.
Now, we are introduced to these creatures’ backstory, which, characteristically for the series, is full of tragedy but also humor. Gigglywinks, one of the figglybumps, goes to war to defend his town, and there would be nothing funny about this if Martín Morazzo didn’t depict him and the rest of the soldiers as adorable furry animals with marshmallow guns. The language of the story is also indicative of this contrast. Gigglywinks’ superior shouts: “On your feet, you irresistible little rabbitesque murder machines!,” and the image of him, adorned with marshmallow ammunition, adds to the grotesque effect.
Figglybumps, with their unique ways of expressing themselves (“It’s the cutest-wootest-tootest thing I ever did see!”), are not the only characters in the series to lend a distinct voice to a story. For example, “A Scale (Sort of a Poem)”—from Volume 8, Chapter 31—is interesting not only in terms of its structure, but also in the way it’s written. As evident from the title, it’s a “sort of a poem”—free verse that explores themes of family, love, and the transience of life. Another great example of a “voicey” narration is “Watch as It All Recedes” (Volume 5, Chapter 18), told from the point of view of a dying man whose memories and words are taken away by a gremlin. Likewise, in the second part of Volume 10’s concluding story, “Decomposition in a Wreck,” we read the prose of a truck driver, Jud. Holding a PhD in comparative literature, but working the only job he managed to find, Jud writes short stories in his free time. After hundreds of rejections, his work is published in The New Yorker, and we see it at the end of the chapter, written in imitation of The New Yorker’s literary style and presented in the magazine’s recognizable font and formatting.
Both parts of “Decomposition in a Wreck” break other conventions, too. A narrator’s voice addresses the readers and teaches us how decomposition works in comics, while telling a five-second story stretched into twenty-eight pages: The Johnson family (Thomas, Carolina, and their children Evalina and Tommy Jr.) crash into a truck; the five seconds between the collision and their death is what constitutes this slow-motion story, with the parents seeing a few vivid memories from their past, Tommy Jr. getting a glimpse into the future, and Evalina lingering in a surreal dream. The narrator’s voice comments on the events in the story, the way in which they are presented, and the familiar themes of death, time, fleeting moments of happiness, and broken relationships. “Love changes shape over time,” the narrator notices, the same way the Johnsons’ sedan changes shape in the five seconds it takes to crash into the truck.
Part two focuses on the truck drivers, Jud and Mike. Jud is not the only creative character in the series. There are musicians, writers, language enthusiasts, but their fate is not different from characters who work in an office—in the Ice Cream Man universe no one is spared. One unobtrusive but ubiquitous force that adds to this hopeless feeling is the Holt Company, by which Jud and Mike are employed. In the world of the series, Holt is a conglomerate that owns everything—from personal care products and food brands to electronics companies, publishing houses, and science labs. In addition to the Holt truck in “Decomposition in a Wreck,” attentive readers might notice Jeremiah Holt, the owner of the Holt corporation, on the cover of Forbes in a newsstand. Details like these build a tangible setting. The series has its own corporations, symbols (Holt’s is a triangle, reminiscent of an ice cream cone), towns, alleyways, and recurring characters. In Volume 10, alongside the figglybumps, such characters include Doctors Naik and Sabrina, a boy with a red balloon, and, of course, the ice cream man.
Who is this eponymous person, smiling from every cover of the series? He’s referred to by many names: Rick, Riccardus, the smiling man, the Spider King. He takes different shapes: a newspaper vendor, a TV host, a superhero figure, a coat check attendant, even a duck or a fish. Often, Rick is presented as a devious vendor of frozen dairy who has a set of distinguishing characteristics: green eyes, a spotless white uniform, a cap, and a wide, unnerving smile, sometimes with fangs instead of teeth. In some chapters he doesn’t appear at all, but his traces can be seen in small details: in Volume 10 it’s Rick’s Sweets ice cream, Rick’s face on the tablet in the Johnson family’s car, Rick as a monk in Evalina’s vision, and so on. After all, he is not a man, but “an idea” (“Border Story,” Volume 3, Chapter 10), an embodiment of terror; sometimes quiet and inconspicuous, sometimes harsh and bloody.
The ice cream man is actively malicious, although in some stories he gives characters a choice, and their decisions, unsurprisingly, have negative consequences. In “Coat Check Story” (Volume 4, Chapter 15), he offers a woman named Lillian someone else’s coat, which ends badly for her. In “Rainbow Sprinkles” (Volume 1, Chapter 2), Rick conveniently abandons his ice-cream truck so that Karen can steal it, and then, later, presents her with something she can’t resist taking. In Volume 10, however, there are few choices to be made.
Take its second story, “Escape from Garyland.” It’s a story of clones, all named Gary, living in a prison-like facility and doing meaningless jobs, such as measuring blades of grass or—like our main character and narrator, Gary 38—raking leaves that appear out of nowhere (there are no trees on the territory of Garyland). When one of the clones, Gary 59, seeds doubt in our narrator’s mind, Gary 38 suddenly realizes it’s not normal to look identical to so many other people, to eat vanilla ice cream for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and never question anything.
The story seems to provide social commentary and ask questions. How real is your reality? Is your life meaningless and empty? How often do you go through motions instead of finding a greater purpose, a better life? Previous chapters of the series have raised similar issues: “Ballad of a Falling Man” (Volume 2, Chapter 5), “TV Story” (Volume 3, Chapter 11), “The Morphometasis” (Volume 7, Chapter 27), and many others. As before, W. Maxwell Prince adds meta elements to his writing: Gary 38 breaks the fourth wall, addresses the readers, and beckons us to follow him on the tour of Garyland. Other such memorable examples of experimenting with conventions are “Palindromes” (Volume 4, Chapter 13), a story that can be read forwards or backwards; “Strange Neapolitan” (Volume 2, Chapter 6), with three stories told at the same time, and which Chris O’Halloran colors like the flavors of Neapolitan ice cream; “Unfortunate Ancestry” (Volume 7, Chapter 26), a comic that should be read vertically; “For Kids” (Volume 5, Chapter 20), parts of which imitate children’s books; and “My Little Poltergeist” (Volume 2, Chapter 7), which features a child’s drawings that correspond with the plot.
For all this variation, readers familiar with the series know that, more often than not, the characters are doomed. This is why rare flickers of hope are so precious (and almost out of place) in the universe of this comic book. Yet Volume 10, despite its dark tone, has moments of unexpected, bittersweet optimism. “We’re all connected—through death, through suffering,” we read in the eighth chapter of this series’ second volume. “Through our fleeting, ephemeral moments of joy. And yet there’s something that separates us … Something’s keeping us from seeing the truth. It’s that voice.” The voice in our head might be the ice cream man, whispering bad ideas to us; but it could also be ourselves, sabotaging our lives.
This is the aspect that I enjoy most about Ice Cream Man: those “ephemeral moments of joy” that creep up on you so suddenly when all you expect is a grim array of horror, pain, and suffering (just like in real life, some might say). The release of Volume 11 in September 2025 is a good reason to have a look at the series if you haven’t already, to delve into this disturbing, yet engrossing, world with its occasional, tiny, hopeful bits to savor. A scoop of Good Ol’ Fashioned Vanilla, anyone?