Ice Cream Man Volume 1: Rainbow Sprinkles

Product Information

In the summer of 1994, a haunted house walks across California. Inside is Ami, lead singer of a high school punk band—who’s been missing for weeks. How did she get there? What do these ghosts want? And does this mean the band has to break up?Expect three-chord songs and big bloody action as Power Rangers meets The Shining (yes really), and as writer DAN WATTERS ( Lucifer, COFFIN BOUND) and artist CASPAR WIJNGAARD (LIMBO, Star Wars, Peter Cannon: Thunderbolt) delve into the horrors of misspent youth. There is a companion six-issue mini series called Haha with the final issue crossing over by telling the origin story of Happy Hank who first appeared in Ice Cream Man #8. Similarly, the mini series Swan Songs crosses over in it's sixth issue.

Anthology Comic: Aside from a few recurring characters each issue is episodic and follows different protagonists and their encounters with the titular ice cream man. I guess the truth is hard and sad sometimes. But that’s why we have stories...to help us forget the truth for a little while. Stories make the world a beautiful place. Even when they end...” Then, legendary Batman: The Animated Series creator PAUL DINI, STEVE LANGFORD, and JOHN McCREA (DEAD EYES, Hitman) petrify with the party antics of Shingo, the birthday clown with an appetite for more than cake!Story 12: I really love how the author tells each story in such a unique format. This one was certainly different. Even though I'm not huge on space stuff, this was pretty cool. And a nice way to end the book, I'd say. ☆☆☆.5 This is a little town where the Ice Cream Man resides to hand out, well, Ice cream to everyone. No, he's not a creepy pedo, which was my first guess when seeing the cover or reading about him. Instead, he almost haunts the town like the grim reaper. Going around doing the bye byes for most people in the town and showing them true horrors. This is four stories, all varying from really creepy and entertaining to just okay. The highlights being a story about a boy and his spider and the final story about a father letting go of his son who has passed. The only reason I didn't rate this 5 stars is because some of these stories could have been better or longer. In some of them, the creators had a specific lesson or message in mind. In others, they wanted to make the reader to think for themselves. In this, they 100% delivered! Bad: The middle of the book suffers from being "okay". Not bad stories by any means but never anything all that enthralling. I also thought the third story was the worst.

Fun with Palindromes: Issue 13 in it's entirety is a palindrome and is read the same no matter which end the reader starts from. Given all of the surreal and disturbing imagery contained in the issue the effect this has is... unnerving.

This Comic Book provides examples of:

Lord of The Flies meets vampires in the first volume of a bold new ongoing series from JEFF LEMIRE & DUSTIN NGUYEN, the Eisner-winning creative team behind the bestselling DESCENDER and ASCENDER series. There are four unrelated tales in this collection, bound together by the mysterious Ice Cream Man. The tales feature a kid living with the corpses of his dead parents, a couple junkies, a down and out one hit wonder, and a man giving his best friend a eulogy.

The Ice Cream Man series is a modern day version of “The Twilight Zone”, with macabre stories, all of them thought-provoking. Ice Cream Man #36 is another great tale, this time focusing on a sailor named Winslow who lost his daughter when she was swallowed whole by a whale. Winslow becomes obsessed with finding the whale, convinced his daughter is still alive, but he’s not prepared for what he finds at the end of his journey. Convenient Miscarriage: The main protagonists of issue 14 suffered this at some point in the past, which had a massive negative impact on their marriage. A contempt, cosmic parasitic being known as the Ice Cream Man takes solace in terrorizing anyone that’s around him, squirming around in the shadows like a bug under your skin, striking your reality down before you even know what’s happened. A tale of existential familial horror by JAMES TYNION IV (THE DEPARTMENT OF TRUTH, RAZORBLADES) and GAVIN FULLERTON (BOG BODIES, Bags). Thom is moving cross-country with his family and dragging the past along with them. His son, Jamie, is seeing monsters in the bedroom closet and will not let them go. There are some genuinely decent ideas here, though some average execution often lets them down at times. The art too, is hit and miss, with its very indie leanings working at times, and looking a bit amateurish at others. One thing you can credit this book for is its originality. I don't think I've ever seen such an original collection of 'horror' stories ever assembled together in one place. But again, originality doesn't always equal good. If some of these more middling issues had been better executed, even with more traditional stories and settings, I would have finished this book enjoying it more than I ultimately did.

Covers Always Lie: The front cover ◊ of the Ice Cream Man Volume 1 graphic novel compilation. It looks all happy and whimsical with all those smiling children. Very misleading, given the actual content of the stories.

Spiders Are Scary: Issue 1 gets a lot of mileage out of this trope, though it helps that said spider is one of the most venomous species on the planet. Jedidiah Jenkins is a simple farmer. But his cash crop isn’t corn or soy. He grows fast-healing, highly-customizable human organs. For years, Jed’s organic transplants have brought healing to many, but deep in the soil of the Jenkins Family Farm something sinister has taken root. Today this dark seed will begin to sprout, and the Jenkins family will be the first to taste its bitter fruit. Confession Cam: Played for Horror in the chapter where a scriptwriter gets Trapped in TV Land by the eponymous Humanoid Abomination and finds himself in increasingly disturbing reality shows. Each time he shifts to another show, there are interludes like this where the guy details how he suddenly found himself in these shows, how disturbed he is by what's going on, and how desperate he is to leave. There are also interviews with the other show participants (like a mannequin woman in a dating show and three zombie women in a Real Housewives sendup) who talk about their roles in the disturbing shows like nothing unusual is going on, as well as an interview with the scriptwriter's uncle who was also pulled into the shows, killed, and is now surprised that he's dead. Male Frontal Nudity: The creepy little gremlin that appears in issue 18 is fully nude... including his penis. New Media Are Evil: Issue 11 has a modern media addict who neglected his family end up trapped in various tv shows.

Collected Editions

Book Three here is even worse. It wants to giveth of the big lesson, but portentous, pretentious and just plain pathetic are far too close. Something trying for a mythos with the two Main Men is of very little use in the great scheme of things; a story that starts in fluent Spanish only makes you think the creators said "hey, you know 'Buffy' got away with odd-ball one-offs that were both curve-balls, and great – d'you think we can do the first, knowing we'll never manage the second?". A lesson in how bad reality TV is just seems childish, for all its evisceration. And some kind of sci-fi story ends my time with this franchise. Collectively, all four show the series is nothing without the town, but prove it's not much more than nothing full stop. Body Horror: All over the place, the comic usually has at least one nasty example of this per issue.