If you feel like comics are repetitive and devoid of ideas, you haven’t read Ice Cream Man from W. Maxwell Prince and Martín Morazzo. Superheroes live, die, and live again, but with today’s release of Ice Cream Man: The Mortal Coil, these creators aren’t interested in doing things by the book. The project is a 55-card deck of playing cards, designed to be read for a completely new reading experience. It’s not only creatively rich, it’s a new kind of reading experience you can’t miss.
I can’t tell you how fun it was to pop this deck open and read it card by card. For just $10, you can own a deck of cards that is meant to be read in one specific order, with surprises throughout and fun plays on conventional card games you know and love. The tactile nature of reading the comic card by card adds to its pacing, interactivity, and cleverness. It also makes the story somehow more intimate, especially once you read the final card.
The standard 52 playing card deck is integrated cleverly, for instance, as well as Magic: The Gathering style playing cards, Uno, and some surprises on top of that. In all honesty, I could see them doing more decks like this, even with the creative use of different card types; there’s potential for more here.
There are some good surprises in this deck.
Most cards feature one panel of art by Morazzo, with colors by Chris O’Halloran. Though the deck isn’t standard size, but much smaller, the dialogue in panels is easy to read, and the art is easy to follow. Morazzo’s art is as good as ever, with some visually striking beats, though most of the narrative plays out as a domestic story of divorce, gambling, and the stresses those things have on a small family of four.
For each card with art, Prince writes in a conventional prose style, drawing you into the story. It takes about two cards to figure out what’s going on as Prince plays around with card game conventions woven into the narrative. To say I was almost rushing to read this out of curiosity and excitement is an understatement.
Note the warning.
Much like many Ice Cream Man stories, the narrative features conventional horrors of day-to-day life, such as how gambling can ruin a life —or lives, in this tale. The Ice Cream Man makes an appearance, along with a semi-supernatural element that haunts the family for much of the deck. The balance is a bit more realistic than previous Ice Cream Man tales, though just as horrifying and disturbing.
Ice Cream Man: The Mortal Coil is a brilliant evolution of the comic medium. It’s an eerie, innovative blend of prose, panels, and play that turns a deck of cards into a meditation on luck, loss, and the human condition. W. Maxwell Prince and Martín Morazzo continue to prove that Ice Cream Man isn’t just a comic—it’s a creative laboratory, always testing how far storytelling can stretch without breaking.
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