I’ve been waiting for this one for a while, and I got weak and ceded to Hoopla rather than wait for the TPB to arrive at my local library.

I continue to appreciate this series, and Issue 43 (the real horror is what’s going on in the world right now) is really good, a highlight of the whole thing. I have to admit, though, that it didn’t otherwise feel worth the wait. Maybe I got my expectations too high, or maybe there are just diminishing returns. I’m not giving up on the series, but I feel like it’s uneven.

Still good! Not the most life-changing of the series, but enjoyable. I have heard good things about some of the issues in Volume Eleven, so I’m really looking forward to getting that.

For reasons I don’t have to get into here, summer is one of the hardest times of year in mental health terms, and over the course of the past few months, I’ve had my fair share of existential dread and feeling adrift. As I wrote last week, that meant that I was hesitant to start reading the comics series Ice Cream Man, because I was afraid that it would further fuel that dread.

I felt like this one didn’t stand out to me. I’ll gladly keep reading, but this was the most “meh” so far.

This continues to be unexpectedly good. I enjoy how self-referential it’s becoming with time—not the indulgent kind but the rewards you for paying attention kind. This is my second-to-last TPB I have out, and I’m already feeling like I need to reserve some more.

This volume wasn’t life-changing, but I’m hooked on the series now, and I’m enjoying even the bits that aren’t what won me over.

The Watchman parody in this volume is as good as the Superman one in the last. The self-references are also good, and I’m interested in the “maybe I don’t need to do this” theme (even if I didn’t put the book down myself when challenged to).

Okay, I still find myself repeatedly wondering if I really want to be reading this, but this volume was good. Three of the four issues had lines that I could write sermons around. For such a weird, creepy series, when it gets meaningful, it really lands.

This volume wasn’t as hopeful as the last collection I read, and I have mixed feelings on the level of creepiness in these stories. The palindrome comic and the one happy story kept me going, but I’m not as keen on this series as I was a few days ago. Let’s see how things go in the next TPB.

In the beginning of the year, I wrote a post about noticing that hoopla had stopped allowing screenshots in its app, which is super dumb. While my chief regret in starting to read the surreal horror comic series Ice Cream Man on hoopla instead of with the physical TPBs available at my local library is because it’s a raw deal for the library, I remembered this morning another reason: That I couldn’t take pictures of panels that impressed me in the same way that I could with a TPB. This is dumb, and I regret the use I’ve been making of hoopla over the summer. I’ve also taken a break from writing this post to reserve the next several TPBs at a library, so I won’t be tempted to go back to hoopla when my borrows reset on September 1st.

Kiddo was off school yesterday, so we took a trip to the library, where I saw the first 7-8 TPBs of this series on the shelf. I nearly checked out the first four, but on second thought, I put them back. This series shouldn’t work for me. It’s not my preferred style of art, it’s full of body and existential horror, and one of the reasons I put those TPBs back is because I was concerned I wouldn’t be able to sleep if I tried reading them.

The surreal horror comic “Ice Cream Man” is very different than the Australian Eurovision entry “Milkshake Man,” so it’s weird to have the latter stuck in my head while reading the former.