Ice Cream Man is consistently one of my favorite comics on the stands. Created by W. Maxwell Prince and Martin Morazzo and published by Image, it's essentially a surrealist horror anthology. Each issue tells a different hyper-stylized story of scary suburban existentialism, all loosely connected by, well, an Ice Cream Man, who may-or-may-not be some sort of eternal demon and/or angelic savior. Kind of.
But for Prince and Morazzo, it's not enough to tell a different story with different characters every time — they often take wild narrative risks as well. There's one issue that's told entirely as a palindrome; another one uses Neopolitan Ice Cream to riff on the "Sliding Doors" idea, where the choice of which ice cream flavor you lick first could determine the path of your future. And in the most recent issue, number 26, a man searches for the roots of his depression and addiction by literally falling down his family tree … and it's all comprised of a single image of the fall.
I read the issue on my iPad, which I honestly sort of regret. As author W. Maxwell Prince shows in the Instagram post above, you can disassemble a printed copy of the issue and lay it out page-by-page so it's one single 15-foot-long comic book panel. Pretty cool!
Ice Cream Man [W. Maxwell Prince & Martin Morazzo / Image Comics]
