If you love horror and haven’t yet discovered Image’s Ice Cream Man series, this week’s trade paperback of Volume 11 is a great place to start. This isn’t Friday the 13th or Five Nights at Freddy’s style horror – this is horror that seeps into your bones, that fills you with unease and hits on an existential level.
The beautiful thing about the series is that each issue tells a self-contained story with a beginning and ending. Much like The Twilight Zone, there’s a character (the titular Ice Cream Man) who always appears in some fashion in each issue, but there’s no character history to keep track of or reams of back issues to read to catch up with, meaning you can jump into the series at any point.
This volume, which collects issues #40-44 of the series, features the usual masterful work of writer W. Maxwell Prince and artist Martin Morazzo. The first story in the book is a horror twist on James Bond, set in steamy Cuba and involving a dairy company that adds a bit more to their products than just milk. It’s an incredibly creepy story, with elements of cults, grisly executions and ancient beings encroaching into our reality.
The next story, titled “Horror House”, at first seems to be a typical haunted house yarn, as a family deals with moving into a malevolent house. It’s reminiscent of the first season of American Horror Story, but it soon turns into something far more unnerving than that. This story’s guaranteed to disturb you because it not only proposes that the real world (specifically the current state of the world) is more terrifying than any fictional horror story, it brings the receipts to back that up.
As great as those stories are, they pale in comparison to the now-legendary issue #43, included in this volume and titled “One-Page Horror Stories”, featuring a multitude of one-page horror tales from creators Grant Morrison, Geoff Johns, Zoe Thorogood, Patton Oswalt, Jeff Lemire, and Matt Fraction, among others.
There is no weak link here; every story ranges from good to spectacular and I was genuinely surprised by the variety of the stories, ranging from deeply personal tales to horror comedy and even some laced with melancholy. If any single issue deserves an “Issue of the Year” award, it’s this one.
The book ends with a darkly comic tale that eases you out with a conclusion that’s the most traditional type of horror in the book.
Since this series began, I’ve always been enchanted by its morbid stories and its fantastic artwork, and this volume is no exception. Do yourself a favor and get a head start on Halloween by picking up this volume. You won’t be disappointed but you may find it difficult to sleep after reading it. Who needs sleep, anyway?
