Ice Cream Man, Volume 7: Certain Descents

Ice Cream Man

by W. Maxwell Prince, Martín Morazzo (Artist), Chris O'Halloran (Artist)

ICE CREAM MAN― the critically acclaimed, best-selling anthological comic book series―continues here with four more unfortunate, enervating episodes of descent: a plane falls from the sky; a man climbs to the bottom of his family tree; Oscar’s blood pressure dips below 90/60! It’s a compendium of come-downs carefully calibrated for curious and crestfallen content-consumers...so come join us below.

Collects ICE CREAM MAN #25-28

Genres: Comics, Graphic Novels, Horror, Fiction, Graphic Novels Comics, Comic Book, Short Stories

138 pages, Kindle Edition

First published February 23, 2022

About the author

W. Maxwell Prince writes in Brooklyn and lives with his wife, daughter, and two cats called Mischief and Mayhem. He is the author of One Week in the Library, The Electric Sublime, and Judas: The Last Days. When not writing, he tries to render all of human experience in chart form.

Reviews

[Dave Schaafsma · Rating 5 out of 5]

“We are all going down”--stitched on a pillow by a woman on a flight about to crash

“What does catastrophic failure even mean?”--Pilot to co-pilot, seeing this message on a screen

Entropy. . . gravity. . . the decline of civilization. . . down the tubes to Hell. . . we all fall down, eventually. Ice Cream Man, volume seven (!?), with all its glorious ice cream pastel coloring, is a comics collection of horror shorts featuring fresh takes on narrative approaches to the genre, with an inexplicably scary ice cream man (okay, he's a demon) at the center of each nightmare sequence.

In the first story, a plane is in the process of crashing after the ice cream man talked a woman into taking a bomb in her luggage. A woman stitches a meme on a pillow: “We are all going down,” and this theme weaves its way through each of the four principal stories. And ice cream, and ice cream man, naturally, In the slow plane crash story we are in a nightmare worthy of Hitchcock or Rod Serling, and in fact there is a reference to a Twilight Zone episode where a man is terrified as he sees a man on the wing:

https://giphy.com/clips/paramountplus...

Our chief focus in the airplane story is on a man who dean’t understand why no one is panicking as he is about the plan on fire and going down! Where can he get a parachute?!

The second story is about a man who really wants to understand who he is! How did I get to be such a screw-up? So he explores his family tree, an actual tree, where he meets his ancestors, who are all screw-ups, and at one point he falls off a branch. . . going down, as the pillow reads. You have to shift the pages 90 degrees so you can see the length of the tall tree of his screwed-up background.

A third story involves a man named Greg who was a cockroach before becoming a man, an inversion of Franz Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” and Gregor Samsa.

The fourth story, building on the bug story, is about an entymologist (words guy) who is mistaken for an entomologist (bugs guy) on an exotic quest to see a guru in Tibet. In this one they go up and up and up the mountain! Ah, but we have mainly been going down in the other stories. . . oh oh! And wait, could the guru be. . . . the ice cream man?!

I really like these stories, interlinked with psychedelic or horror logic, with interwoven motifs that work better than they do in previous volumes. It could just be that I am in the groove of the series now, but I think this volume is the best one so far.

[Rachel (TheShadesofOrange) · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 Stars
This is one of the most inconsistent graphic novel series. When it's good, it's great, but when it's not… it's really not. I loved the first story which was nightmare fuel for anyone taking a plane trip. Unfortunately the other stories didn't work for me.

[Scott Rhee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Buckle up, folks, the plane is going down! That's the theme of W. Maxwell Prince's seventh volume of his miscellaneous real-world horror anthology series Ice Cream Man. Whether it's the final minutes of the passengers of an airplane in a nosedive, a man literally falling out of his family tree, a cockroach waking up one morning to find himself transformed into a human, or an etymologist (study of words, not bugs) who climbs a mountain and must face climbing back down, all manifestations---literal and figurative---of the concept of "we're going down!" is deliciously and horrifically examined.

Prince is a madman! But a gloriously brilliant, funny, and psychotic madman...

[Jasmine · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think this was my favorite out of the collection. The stories seemed a little more fleshed out, but still kept the fun creepiness intact.

[Terry Mcginnis · Rating 2 out of 5]

Only one good story this time around, and no progression with the "ice cream man" as an antagonist, which was sort of a letdown. It might be time to start wrapping this "story" up.

[Valéria. · Rating 4 out of 5]

I still enjoy it, I love how interlinked it is either with previous stories or within the book itself. We’re all going down..

[Chris Lemmerman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Four more Ice Cream Man tales, each of which involves a fall or a descent of some kind.

Issue 25 is an extra-sized story about a plane falling out of the sky and the various reactions to that. The final page 'twist' as it were just goes to show that you can't believe a thing you read in this comic, because you never know what's real and what isn't. There's also a back-up story featuring the trial of the Ice Cream Man, but this is more of a prelude to something in the far future than anything substantial just yet.

Issue 26 is told in a landscape orientation, which usually annoys the hell out of me, but I really enjoyed this story about a man climbing down his family tree and tracing back all of the reasons why he has failed himself and his family. This is one of those 'kind of hopeful, kind of bleak' stories that ICM does so well. It's not a happy ending, but it's definitely one with some promise.

27 tells the tale of a bug who magically finds himself a human. This one's weird, and I'm not sure if it's meant to be a commentary on the futility of our daily lives, the simplicity of being a bug, or something else entirely, but it's very off-putting to watch the bug become a human. The final resolution of it all is quite clever though, as is the final page image.

And finally, issue 28 involves an etymologist climbing a mountain in an effort to find the word at the centre of all things. This one's got a lot of little references to past stories, definitely something that has ramped up as the series goes on, and while the ending is a bit of a foregone conclusion, it's still fun to watch it all unfold.

While the opening few volumes of this series seemed to veer wildly from amazing to just okay, it seems to have settled into a steady pattern of excellence.

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

This series is pretty awesome. This particular volume wasn't as fun as some previous. They all lean into some pretty dark humor, obviously, but this was more focused on the surreal horror of the series. Still 4 stars because that content is aces with me, but I miss the smack of humor that usually perfects the formula.

[Robert · Rating 4 out of 5]

Even more unsettling and esoteric than ever. I guess all that's certain is that we're all goiiiiiingggggg
d
.o
..w
....n
.....!

[Benji Glaab · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 Stars Marazzo and Prince continue to turn out a page turner that just seems to hit a sweet spot for me. Weird as all hell yet miserable characters, and many things to contemplate through out. And of course there is always an original concept for each one shot. I'm not personally concerned about the overarching narrative since I'm enjoying the journey so much.

[Adam Fisher · Rating 4 out of 5]

I still can't get enough of this title. A true modern horror masterpiece in the anthology style.
Stories:
- "Certain Descents" - a plane crash is happening and people both on the ground and in the air react to it, questioning existence and trying to deal with other tragedies.
- "Unfortunately Ancestry" is about a man who is delving into his family's past and finding out that some of the things he's bad with or at might be due to something in his past.... but we are all only human after all....
- "The Morphometasis" tells the story of a roach named Grg who ingests human blood and grows to become Greg the human. Both lives have advantages and disadvantages, but what happens when Greg sees something that insects see often and humans see rarely?
- "The Etymologist Rises" has a man very focused on getting to the top of a mountain to find enlightenment from a wise monk. This last story (along with an interlude from earlier) is beginning to lead us towards the possible end of the title, with the trial of the Ice Cream Man.... this should be very interesting, especially if we get to see all the characters he's affected throughout the series.

Hopefully it's not ending too soon. This is one of my favorite active comic titles.
Strong recommend.

[James DeSantis · Rating 2 out of 5]

Besides the first story, about them being on a airplane, and ending in a very dark and fucked up way, I didn't like the rest of this volume much. It was missing a certain something.

[BookCupid · Rating 3 out of 5]

Loved the Kafka retelling.

[Zack Clemmons · Rating 2 out of 5]

My annual dose of nihilistic myth-making. Helpful reminder of the bleakness so many carry and some celebrate.

[Nikola Š · Rating 2 out of 5]

So here's my problem with Ice Cream Man: It's a frustrating combination of interesting stylistic exercises (one could call them gimmicks, but they are pretty fun gimmicks) and one-note misery which has gotten stale around issue 3. Now, I don't mind misery as such, especially in a comic that labels itself as horror (I guess existential horror would be a more precise category), but the misery presented so far has been laughingly - same. Practically every Prince's character is a sad sack in their late 30s, having marital and/or opioid problems. That's it. That's the breadth of ICM's human condition, issue after issue after colorful-homage-to-some-pop-culture issue.

Sure, there are exceptions, and those are the spots where this series shines: a story of loss told in perfect palindrome; a melancholic step-by-step guide on dying; a sweet, nonjudgemental christmas story about an abortion. The less memorable issues stand fine by themselves as well - it's just when you read them as a series, it becomes apparent how pointless it all is.

[Jam Hosting Reviews · Rating 5 out of 5]

**The Ice Cream Man vol 7: or ine dey ind wht r wrdz anewy?** The volume kicks off rather explosively with a plane crash where no one really seems to be freaking out and even the pilots are more concerned with how annoying the catastrophic alarm is than how to resolve the missing wing. There’s only one man on the plane actually freaking out compared to everyone else just quietly dealing in their own ways. This is a regular sort of sentiment throughout the series but I enjoy the lighter softer touch here with just a hint of optimism. If you take the temporal scope of the series seriously then the earth ends terribly and the last human astronaut is destroyed by the ice cream man. But the cowboy in black is still there and eventually, in a distant iteration of reality, the evil that the ice cream man represents will finally be put on trial and made to answer for what he’s done. That truly seems like a small victory. The second issue was a little bit hard to read because it went left to right horizontally as a tree, a family tree of a young man with substance-abuse and other problems like chronic anxiety. He looks back to his last traceable ancestor traveling to Ellis Island and living off his penmanship, which is soon replaced by printing machines and he’s left to self medicate in an opium den around the turn of the century. His daughter, who makes levi denim jeans mechanically doesn’t have it much better and her son who is his father follows in the same footsteps. It’s the little hints of optimism peeking below the surface in the story that encourage me because we also sees his daughter that he’ll have some day and hope that her generation and those to follow won’t inherit the sins of the past. The table around which the generations gather was a really sweet image and a lovely way to end this issue.

The 3rd issue though was my absolute favorite in this volume, possibly my favorite of the entire series as we experience reverse Gregor Samsa as a cockroach is cursed to turn into a human. It’s fascinating to see the simple life of a bug and the complicated life of a human it has to deal with when it winds up with a family/kids with lots of joys but even more anxieties and responsibilities as it trades its comfortable box in an alleyway for a confining office box in the city. Of all the stories, this one I felt was the most heartbreaking because the poor little bug just does its best as a human but being a human is very difficult sometimes and you lose sight of your raison d’être. And the last one is about the etymology of words and someone seeking the very first word at the source of language itself. I love words so the symbolic explanations of word histories and meanings was neat. With finishing that volume I managed to marathon all compiled 28 issues of the series with just one released in April that hasn’t been put in a collection yet, which I may go hunting for at my local comic book shop. Would I recommend reading this series to anyone? Honestly I don’t know how many people would really like it. It’s a tough one to get into but it’s one that was really easy for me to read because it has that pulpy quality that just flows through. It also reminds me of the kind of things I was looking for in the Lost television series along with works of Stephen King where there is this dark sense of opposing forces and cruelty in the world and sort of pop culture alongside emotion and broken people and all that together in a mix which is appropriate to comic books and pays off in interesting and fascinating ways. This series is a difficult one to really love but it worked for me. As a capper for now until the publications catch up, as volume eight will be released in November, I am going to award this volume five blue raspberry sorbet scoops in a waffle cone out of five.

[Fizzgig76 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reprints Ice Cream Man #25-28 (August 2021-January 2022). The Ice Cream Man is back with tales of mystery and terror. The last moments for a commercial airline as it crashes to the ground. A man explores his family tree from the top branches to the roots and beyond. A cockroach finds himself turned into a man…and is trapped as a bug in a man’s world. An etymologist seeks out the ultimate word and instead learns the power of words can be deadly.

Written by W. Maxwell Prince, Ice Cream Man Volume 7: Certain Descents is an Image Comics horror/sci-fi anthology collection. Following Ice Cream Man Volume 6: Just Desserts, the collection features art by Martin Morazzo.

Ice Cream Man might be my favorite discovery during the pandemic. With a lot of buzz, I didn’t actually have a lot of hope. It feels like a lot of those buzzy books don’t hit the mark and are instead a bit of a drag. Each volume of Ice Cream Man proves that idea wrong.

The biggest problem with Ice Cream Man is that you hate for each volume to end. With short four issue runs and issues that sometimes are rather minimal on words, the series is a quick read. Each issue bring you something new and a twist, but the weirdness carries a unifying theme that resonates through the whole series.

The series also hints at a bigger storyline. My least favorite of the collections mostly deals with the past of the Ice Cream Man, but this volume handles things better by injecting the Riccardus story throughout the issues. This collection starts to introduce a story of Riccardus (aka the Ice Cream Man) on trial in some far-flung future. It is presented as a back-up story in Ice Cream Man #25 and is touched on again in Ice Cream Man #28…but not fully explained. It is obtuse enough that you want to find the mystery.

Another fun issue in this collection has to be the reverse of Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis where a cockroach wakes up a man. The idea of people being bugs and how a bug would perceive our world is interesting, but in classic Ice Cream Man fashion, it does end rather quickly since you want to wrap up the story for the issue.

Ice Cream Man Volume 7: Certain Descents is another fun collection in a series that has endless potential. Ice Cream Man is a great take on The Twilight Zone format. It brings ethical questions, horror, science-fiction, and an enigmatic “host” that has secrets himself. If you still haven’t checked out Ice Cream Man, get yourself a scoop.

[Renato]

Deep into the final legs of this series - we are all going down!

My enjoyment of this series is tied to the following:
a) great creepy stories
b) experimental methods of storytelling
c) a slow addition to the momentum of the "main arc" (Riccardus, Caleb etc)

A and B have always been consistent, but it is C that sometimes lapses in this series (denaturing the strong overstory into random mushy pulp).

The stories included in this volume are as follows:

Paralogue
This one is situated in the middle of the book, and is cited to having taken place "many universe cycles from now". It describes a very large pilgrimage (consisting of imaginary/cognitive beings) slowly making their way towards a temple for a trial of 'the demon god with an ice cream smile'. Riccardus has somehow been caught throughout his cycle of universal infiltration and corruption, and is going to have judgement brought down upon him by Caleb and his uncle (who still remains unnamed). This short venture is evidence that Prince and team are thinking about endgame at this point, and promise much more for the reader at the end of the road.

Catastrophic Failure
A plane is going down, and only one passenger seems to be panicking over their impending death. Is he the only one without the rose tinted shades, or is this a matter of someone who just is not able to let go as their universe ends?

Unfortunate Ancestry
A touching story about a man looking to understand his nature of addiction through his ancestors. As always, the writing team has outdone themselves in seeking new ways of telling stories, as the MC is slowly climbing down a literal redwood tree representing his geneaology.

The Morphometases
A reverse Kafka, where a cockroaches accidental acquisition of language has him rapidly transforming into a human (with all the human foibles as a bonus).

The Etymologist Rises
Unlike the theme of descent in this volume (plane crashing, devolution, climbing down a tree) this one is about an etymologist (and not an entomologist) on a quest to climb up up up to meet a guru on a mountain who can tell him the very first word. Of course, the guru at the top os Riccardus and everything goes wrong.

[Jack · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book opens with the blinking of a Catastrophic Failure light on a commercial flight. As the plane plummets towards the ground, only one person aboard seems to be fighting the inevitable. How do you react when the outcome is all but certain? Do you fight to the last breath? Do you say what you never could before? Do realizations hit you, or do you just become one with everything? "Certain Decisions" doesn't have answers, but it does have some things to consider, as Ice Cream Man always does.

"Paralogue" follows, continuing the background story that underpins Ice Cream Man.

The book then asks you to turn it 90 degrees for "Unfortunate Ancestry", where our man character climbs down his family tree to uncover just why his life is the way it is. Is addiction genetic? Is anxiety? Is there a way to break the cycle, or are we all doomed to fulfil the obligations of our birth?

"The Morphometasis" has a poor cockroach being straddled with human life and responsibilities, and follows up the themes from "Unfortunate Ancestry". It's a beautiful story, far more beautiful than you would expect given the premise. There's something very simple about it, and it's stories like this that have made me fall so madly in love with Ice Cream Man overall.

"The Etymologist Rises" finishes this volume, and I'm still trying to figure out how I feel about it. The central premise is an etymologist giving up everything to try and discover the first word ever spoken. It's a dangerous journey, and leads to some very unexpected places. What will come next? With this book, there is really no telling. Ice Cream Man always delights and surprises, after all.

It's really unfair how wonderful this book continues to be. Can't believe I only discovered it so recently.

[Justin Partridge · Rating 5 out of 5]

To Be Continued…Or Not…Somewhere Toward THE END OF THE ROAD.

ICM continues to kick unholy ass. So much unholy ass that I just went ahead and finished another volume in one go. Truly cannot wait until I can start buying this in single issues.

But in the meantime, four more just belters. Including the 25th “party” issue, a hysterical (right up until the moment it isn’t) send up of Kafka, a peek at the endgame of the title, and a nightmarish trip down the family tree of a loser rendered in 90 degrees.

Also awesome to see that the series can sustain a loose theming as well and not sacrifice quality or tone. Here we have, as the volume’s subtitle suggests, all our characters here are experiencing a sort of personal (or literal) descent. We’ve gotten little tastes of this before but never an explicit feeling of connectivity and tonality and that’s awesome to experience.

We are all going down. But at least we still have comics like this to make the trip a little easier.

[Alex Sarll]

The opening story's overly obvious steals from Pynchon and The Twilight Zone got my back up, but its crashing 'plane with almost everyone aboard fundamentally unbothered had a certain eerie something, and reminded me how much better this series is when it's not getting tangled up in its own not very exciting mythology.

So of course it was immediately followed by an epilogue of exactly that.

Also included: a family tree whose formal experiment wasn't that convincing and which was always going to feel like the kiddie pool after watching All Of Us Strangers last night; and, because the book has always relied too heavily on bugs, both a reverse Metamorphosis and an extended riff on etymology/entomology confusion.

[James De Leon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some solid work on this one, and even some 'happy' endings.

As usual, we get four standalone stories:
- A falling-off-the-sky story with the standard despair sprinkled in; the prologue is the most engaging part of the issue, which seems to set up the mythology for the eventual endgame of the series (okay)
- A family-tree descent where a man journeys down his lineage in a story about acceptance; Prince delivers a dare I say... genuinely nice, even uplifting ending (good)
- A reverse, Kafka-esque speedrun in which a roach becomes a man and finds the experience lacking; as odd as the work it references (okay)
- A man perhaps too enamored with words gets his own cautionary tale (okay)

[Josh · Rating 4 out of 5]

A plane falling from the sky, a cockroach who becomes a man, a supernatural trial and the end of time--Ice Cream Man has grow more fully into its intriguing weirdness, bursting with philosophical questions and human horror. With each entry in this ongoing anthology, the growing nihilism occasionally gives way to hope, the disturbing nightmares break open to reveal beauty, and the disconnected stories take shape in a larger tapestry. As we are granted further glimpses to the battle between good and evil behind the scenes of this series, Prince, Morazzo, and O'Halloran are on a role, and they don't seem to be letting up anytime soon.

[Keen Reader · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5 Stars!

I was pleasantly surprised to stumble upon the seventh volume of this series the other day. Without doubt the best thing about this is the art work, it really is lovely to look at, but unfortunately almost every single story fails and comes to very little at all.

What this really is, is a series of great ideas, strong starting off points, but not one of them is coherent or fully formed and so as a result you are left feeling so is that it?...There is an attempt to crowbar a tenuous link into the stories with the Ice Cream Man, but it’s really poorly done and as a result we are left with some great art work and really crappy stories.

[Bandit · Rating 4 out of 5]

And he’s back. Grinnier than ever. Volume seven of the series is as cheerful as a book that starts with a plane crash can be. Don’t panic, it’s too late to panic.
Then you get a frustratingly (for digital readers) sideways story of a man’s fall down the family tree to understand what makes him the mess that he is.
Follow by a cheekily clever reverse of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis and a tale of an etymologist’s adventure to find a very special word.
All in all, very clever, very intricate, and very, very bleak. As expected.

[Paige · Rating 5 out of 5]

Boy oh boy we are so back! We get a little something about the Ice Cream Man, just enough to peak interest but still not explain anything. I love that you can never trust anything in this series. And can I just say these books are so hard to read in public. You’ve got murders left right and center and people turning into bugs! I love that we discuss the mundanity of life with such insanity and grossness, I enjoy it so much! I really feel like there’s something special with this series, and when it hits boy does it hit.

[Bob Comparda · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you haven't read ice cream man start at volume one, and if you have read it you should already know what to expect. Four new stories about fear, pain, and melancholia. What keeps me coming back are the mini stories that seem to connect everything together. Who is the ice cream man? I feel like we are getting closer and closer to some kind of event, or maybe W. Maxwell Prince just likes to tease us.

[Litwithlove · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am used to the ice cream man series utilizing colors, tricks of the eye, and a unique way of visually telling a story. This volume, however, is done entirely in a photo negative style and it was a real eye strain to read for me. The content was fine, the stories are starting to feel very same-y in this series. The only real stand out to me was a retelling of The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka. This one was of course an odd tale, but it had quite a lot of charm that this series usually doesn't offer.

[Shannon · Rating 3 out of 5]

Individual issue reviews: #25 | #26 | #27 | #28

Total review score: 2.5

[Benjamin Ervin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just amazing anecdotes, stories, and elements. The true successor to the Twilight Zone in every way. It does things with comics that only comics can do, like the Twilight Zone did in it's short run. Forget Black Mirror, this is the true horror anthology that makes us reflect on ourselves, and has some of the best art, colors, and writing in the industry (heavy Grant Morrison/ Moebius vibes here)