Ice Cream Man is a beast unto itself. Created by W. Maxwell Prince and Martin Morazzo with colourist Chris O’Halloran and letterer Good Old Neon, the independent-yet-interconnected horror yarn stands apart from most other comics coming out of Image Comics, forgoing the benefit of a long-form, uninterrupted narrative told over many years in favour of something more novel — a mostly standalone series where any issue could truly be your first, with a faint heartbeat of a plot pulsing throughout the series, telling the story of the demented, weird cosmic creature Riccardus (the titular Ice Cream Man) and his centuries-long feud with Caleb, his nemesis.

Caleb stands for genuine goodness and hope, the belief that life is beautiful and very much worth fighting for — his mantra is "everything is one thing" after all. Riccardus, however, is stricken with a sick sense of nihilism, his own philosophy a twisted inversion of Caleb's. That life is simple and short, that we’re all just meat at the end of the day. This leads into the series’ modus operandi; each issue focuses on some poor soul that Riccardus (Rick) essentially tortures, dangling their fears and insecurities in front of them. People, according to Rick, are susceptible to bad ideas and he feels like it’s his duty to make due with what the universe gives him and slip into the cracks of their minds where he feels like he belongs.

There are some traditional elements of horror involved — ghouls, gremlins, ghosts. A couple of monsters here and there, certainly a shaggy-looking man-beast. A brain-eating vulture. But the real horror comes from the everyday problems of Rick’s victims. They’re facing what we’ve either all faced or will face: the loss of a loved one, becoming your father, or losing your memories. It’s all heightened to a sickening degree of course, but the real soul of the series is how Prince and Morazzo expertly tap into these people’s lives and leave you finishing each issue feeling like you’ve lived in someone else’s skin for 20 or so pages.

I spoke to Prince and Morazzo, and we delved into the motivations behind their stories, their now long-lasting creative relationship, the various influences that have shaped their run, and how the pandemic affected the book in ways no one saw coming.

Popverse: Maxwell, Martin, how surprised are you that the book has found such an audience? That it’s lasted this long?

W. Maxwell Prince: Martín and I worked on a book together before Ice Cream Man called The Electric Sublime at IDW. We had a lot of fun making it and we learned how to work together as a team over the course of those four issues. I pitched Martín this idea [Ice Cream Man] and he thought, “Oh, this guy’s crazy. I’ll draw a couple of issues but I’m sure we’ll be dead by the third or fourth issue.” I probably at the time agreed with him but still wanted to write it anyway.

Through time and persistence we keep making issues and people keep reading them and it seems to have found a really interesting and committed audience. I don’t think Martín or I thought that four years later, we’d still be coming up with one-shot stories for this particular story engine that we’ve made.

Martín Morazzo: Like Will said, I thought it was going to last four books, not four years. Or longer, of course. I remember when Will sent the first script I thought, “This is going to be great.” The pitch he said to me was a bit vague in terms of what the book ended up being.

Prince: I had no idea.

Morazzo: We always talked about it lasting at least 24 issues, so I’ve felt that every issue has been amazing and I’m absolutely grateful for the audience. It’s a really fun book to work on. With Will and Chris [O’Halloran, series colourist], we work really well together. It’s really amazing. We haven’t had a bad moment through the run of the book so far, which is an amazing experience as a comic book artist.

It’s also a really dark and esoteric book, and the fact that it’s running for nearly 30 issues now is incredible.

Prince: You would think, especially considering what we’ve all dealt with for the past two and a half years, that people would want more of that traditional escapist media. Something light and easy. Our book is neither of those things.

It must be doing something right since people read it, get something back from it, and want to come back to it even though it’s, as you said, dark and esoteric, and heady. All these sorts of things that aren’t necessarily immediately palatable or easy to swallow.

These issues aren’t a ton of fun to read necessarily. I think people enjoy them in a very specific way and we’re all super thankful that they’re still enjoying them thirty issues down the line.

I never usually think this way when I read horror books, but as a reader of this series I occasionally put the book down and think, ‘Man. I hope these guys are okay.’

Prince: I’ve had a couple people check in on me and ask, ‘Is everything cool?’

Morazzo: I have to say, I was a little worried with the last issue. We’ve passed April 20 [#29 release date] and I think you’re okay!

Prince: We’ve gone through my funeral and we’re past that into new material. So, I survived my funeral.

Morazzo: That’s awesome.

It’s interesting that you mentioned these past couple of years, has the pandemic affected the way you both think about or approach the book at all?

Prince: Early in the pandemic when the shops shut down, when the printing presses shut down, Martín, Chris and I put together this website where we released little Ice Cream Man short stories every week. One or two of those were specifically about the pandemic. It was our way of staying busy. We were also donating proceeds from the stories we were making to BINC, which is a great foundation that helps struggling comic book stores and brick and mortar bookstores. So I guess there was a pause and a refocus in the middle of what we were doing. The project was called Quarantine Comix, which was eventually collected into a special issue which had all six of our issues as well as some issues from guest creators.

The timing just kind of all worked out where also around that time we had our twentieth issue come out, which was a play on children’s stories. Martín has three daughters, one of them very young, and a toddler. I have a five-year-old who at the time was a toddler. So I was always reading these kids' stories and I was like, ‘Some of these are really weird!’ They’re kind of dark if you just turn one thing to the left.

We did this issue which ended up being, in the middle of the pandemic while we were doing the Quarantine Comix, a weird revival of our book. We sold out three different printings of that issue. The book had new life, new followers, and new attention when we were just about ready to start slowing down toward the end of the run. It gave us new legs and new life.

The pandemic affected us in almost a positive way. We had this really great project that I think people enjoyed and bought us some goodwill with readers and comic shops. It expanded the Ice Cream Man canon; we have these weird four, five-page stories that find their way back into the main issues over the course of time. As things started to come back online, we focused on issues #18, #19, and #20 which I think are our three strongest issues in a row. #20 almost reset the cycle for us, where we were able to start again as if we were publishing a new #1.

The pandemic of course was terrible and isolated us, killed people and fractured families, but specifically where Ice Cream Man is concerned it almost was in our favour because of the choices we made, and luck and timing.

With a book as unique and esoteric as Ice Cream Man, did you ever feel the need to go in a more serialised direction as opposed to a more independently-read series with heartbeats of plot throughout?

Prince: It’s especially challenging for Martín to have to design new characters every single month. I don’t know how many troubled, mid-30s, white males I’ve made him draw at this point, but it’s quite a lot. They’re all different and look unique in their own way, because he’s amazing.

But I’m not good at serialised storytelling. I tried. My first original graphic novel with IDW came out as an OGN but was originally intended to be a six-issue miniseries. It was okay but not great; my voice didn’t really come out in a way that I was especially proud of or that I was excited about.

Then I did The Electric Sublime with Martín which was exciting because he and I very easily fell into a very good working relationship and understanding. I would describe something weird and I didn’t have to work too hard for him to see it. He just said, ‘Oh, I’ll just draw someone diving into a cubist painting.’ That was a serial story but I still didn’t feel like I was telling a story in the best way that I could.

At the same time that I was doing that book, I was doing an Image OGN called One Week in the Library which were all self-contained chapters. When I was doing that, I was like, ‘Oh, I’m kind of good at this.’ Just give me a short amount of space to do something semi-interesting, maybe make the reader interested in a character for a few minutes and then get out and have it be over. Between starting to work with Martín and finding what I was good at, that came together to make Ice Cream Man.

Martín, to go off Will said, what is it like as an artist to in essence create a new world in every issue?

Morazzo: It’s awesome, but it doesn’t last long. Each issue has its settings and its characters. Sometimes it’s a bit hard but it’s really fun, because you can become bored drawing the same characters and settings. With Ice Cream Man it’s absolutely fun.

Will also sends me these brilliant ideas every issue, so every issue is different in tone. I did a comic book you can read forward or backward, I made a book with three stories happening at the same time, I did a space book and a western book. And it’s all inside Ice Cream Man.

I cannot get bored making it, it could last for a hundred issues and I wouldn’t mind because it’s so different. I can try different grids and page layouts, or try to use a lot of shadows or no shadows at all. There are issues where I haven’t used black. I don’t let anybody know that, I play with these kinds of things. It’s fun and challenging.

With a book that’s lasted for so many issues, it’s awesome to tell the story of a character and how they develop. But with Ice Cream Man, it’s like every issue is a #1. I can do whatever I want with it. Well, whatever Will wants with it. It’s fun even though Will makes me draw things that are a bit hard sometimes. But I’ll draw it anyway!

Prince: I have a friend, Deniz Camp, who’s a comic writer. He has a book coming out from Vault, he’s writing Bloodshot, he’s got an Image book coming out, and he put it best. He said, ‘You didn’t make a story. You made a storytelling engine. A little place where you can do what you want from month to month.’ The fact that that kind of freedom that I have as a writer is then also passed onto Martín as an artist and Chris as a colourist, where this is a space where we can all try something new every month and stretch our arms, see what we like and don’t like.

I think it’s a really rich, creative, space that we’ve made for ourselves. We’re not just kicking the can down the road for some plot. We think, ‘How do we make this issue stand out from the last issue?’ It gets everyone’s gears moving, maybe Martín will try a new grid or Chris will try a different saturation on the colours.

It’s been nice to see this weird idea that I didn’t really know exactly what it was at first has become this huge engine of artistic freedom for my collaborators.

I feel like this book also resonates with people because while it does depict traditional horror elements like monsters and gore, it’s really also about normal things that people go through every day like losing a loved one, or slowly turning into your dad, or even losing your memories which is an issue I will ironically never forget.

Morazzo: [laughs] Nobody says they will forget that one!

Prince: That’s my personal favourite issue. When I wrote it, I thought, ‘I don’t know if I can do any better than this.’

It’s one of the few comics that has made me cry, truly.

Prince: That’s great.

Morazzo: I cried while drawing it!

Those moments make it more memorable. You see monsters like giant spiders and remember that this is a horror book so it can certainly go there, but up until that point you’re witnessing people’s sad lives.

Prince: My strength is not horror, I don’t know anything about horror. I don’t watch horror movies, I don’t read horror books. I don’t like being scared. We made those first issues, and because of certain genre elements of the early issues we got lumped into this certain horror movement in comics, which I’m totally cool with and our fans are amazing and have proven to be very close and dedicated readers of what I think is a very challenging book.

Sometimes I have to remind myself that we are a horror outfit, so I’ll write a 24-page book about something sad and realise that it’s a sad drama story with nothing there except a bummer. So I’ll go back and get a monster into it somehow.

Morazzo: That happened with #18?

Prince: Yeah. Because it was just this guy, and I needed a figure that would represent the Ice Cream Man and be something that was strange to look at on the page, because otherwise he was just losing his memories. Which I think would have been a great story, just sad and linear.

We then figured out a way to get this guy into the story, and what happens is that this gremlin appears in other issues in the background in certain panels, hidden in the corners of covers. For a book with no continuity there winds up being quite a bit of continuity except most people don’t realise it.

When it comes to those background characters, is that more of a Will thing or a Martín thing?

Prince: That’s almost 100% Martín.

Morazzo: I wouldn’t say that, I would say it’s 75% me and 25% you. I have fun with those.

Are they characters you personally like seeing or do you find an interesting contrast against the main image?

Morazzo: It gives a sense of continuity. Fans like seeing those characters. To me it’s like a game.

Every time there’s a homeless guy I draw the same one, the one who had a sign in #21 was in #13. When Will writes a homeless guy in the script I ask, “Can I use Dennis?” It shows that somehow everything belongs to the same universe we’re telling stories in.

Whenever I see a branded product I write “ICM” on it. It’s relaxing somehow, because every time I need to put text on a sign I just put ICM on it and I don’t have to think about what else to put on it, like a street sign or a banner.

Prince: For me, those decisions by Martín have elevated the book, especially in the horror space. The book is called ‘Ice Cream Man’ and he appears in a large percentage of the issues but he’s not in every issue. He lurks as an idea in the background in certain places and in some issues just doesn’t appear at all. But through Martín‘s obsession with branding in this universe, we’re always reminded that he’s there, that he’s always around the corner. That’s not something I ever did or wrote into scripts; that’s through Martín playing and doing something else.

We’re already telling good stories and they brought the pages to life even more, because there are these little winks and nods that are almost like echoes. You can feel them echoing through the issues. Sometimes I miss them.

Morazzo: In our last issue, the one that hasn’t been published yet, there’s a scene in the kitchen and over the counter is a box of cereal called Morsels, which is the cereal we introduced in #27.

Prince: I did not see that! Shows how closely I’m reviewing these issues.

Morazzo: Many times I draw people who are about to cross a street, so I’ll draw the Ice Cream Man there. I realised some days ago that I’ve done that in many issues. I didn’t remember that I did it already.

I don’t know how plugged-in you guys are to the online discussion of your book, but over the years I’ve seen the book wrongly characterised as overly nihilistic or consistently dour. Upon my reread I’ve noticed that a lot of issues end on a surprisingly hopeful note.

Prince: A lot of that, not to show my hand too much, is my headspace month-to-month.

In the past four years I’ve had some really tough ones in terms of my personal interior life, and then some joyous transcendent moments where I’m realising what’s important and how silly it is to get caught up in certain anxieties and issues and stuff. So a lot of that is just, “What kind of mood is the author in?” And that will often dictate how the issue ends or what the small message we might be trying to pass on winds up being.

The best example of this is when writing the first four issues of Ice Cream Man, I was not feeling great. I was a new parent, I felt like I wasn’t really good at it. I have a day job and I wasn’t sure I was enjoying that. I had been writing comics, this was my fourth or fifth published comic, but I wasn’t a comic person that anyone really knew or cared about so I was struggling in the middle there. And I wrote these first three issues that were all pretty dark. I was so tired of that, I needed the opposite. And that is where the character Caleb came in.

What if someone walks in with a better message than the Ice Cream Man? Something more positive and transcendental than, “everything is shit and things are bad all the time.” His refrain that “everything is one thing” is all part of one ongoing experience that has its highs and its lows, and that the very worst and the very best are connected through experience and through meaning.

That character was basically me saying, “Oh, shit. I need to get a little happier here.” So I created him, there wound up being this whole mythology about who he is and the Ice Cream Man that formed around that. The specific first appearance of him was me saying, “I need a break from all this dark shit. I need someone to come in onscreen and be a positive influence here.” It is kind of hard to avoid that nihilistic label that we get because that’s how I feel sometimes, but there are other issues where I say, “It’s actually not bad. You can push through to the other side and see how beautiful things are.” I like the fact that it changes issue to issue, it presents one version of it and presents another version of what’s possible.

What are your influences? I see some The Twilight Zone in there given the standalone nature of the series. I also sense some Stephen King, just based on the cosmic eldritch creatures and everyday horror experiences.

Prince: I haven’t read a lot of Stephen King. I’ve read King, and in a past version of my life also worked at a publisher that put out King’s books. But what you initially said about The Twilight Zone is spot-on.

When I was a kid, my parents subscribed to this VHS subscription service that would send you one VHS a month of four to five Twilight Zone episodes. It would always arrive in the mail on a Friday, and it would be the best day of the month. We’d grab it from the mail on Friday night, order a pizza, and watch the episodes. So The Twilight Zone, specifically as an anthological supernatural slash horror slash philosophical canvas has played an incredible role in the way that I craft these stories.

A lot of my personal writing comes from short story writers, specifically Dennis Johnson who most famously wrote Jesus’ Son and a bunch of novels, and is also a poet. George Saunders, the famous short story writer. Donald Barthelme and Robert Coover and Grace Paley…I’m kind of a short story aficionado, it’s what I spend most of my time reading, which kind of makes sense for what the format of Ice Cream Man is. It’s start to finish, try to be really efficient, and tell something satisfying in a short amount of space.

So my influences come more from prose, but The Twilight Zone is definitely number one of the list because as a kid I would look forward to every month when that new cassette would arrive. They were so beautifully designed too. They were all black with the star pattern, and you would open it up and it had these different black and white spaces. I know Martín‘s influences are different, he’s brought a bunch of artistic touchstones into Ice Cream Man.

Morazzo: Since I’ve started drawing, I’ve had different influences. When I was 11 or 12 I used to look at a lot of John Byrne, and copy a lot of his stuff. I admired Jim Lee and drew like him when I was a teenager. I then found European comics and some Japanese comics by Katsuhiro Otomo.

Today somehow I feel like a mix of them all. It’s mostly American comics, superhero comics from the ‘80s and ‘90s, some Marc Silvestri but I don’t think you can see any of him in my work. The one that stands out the most is Moebius, mostly with textures. I have some of Enki Bilal. He’s Croatian, I think, and did this saga called Nikopol, which is about Egyptian gods in this future version of Paris. It’s pretty amazing. I feel like the faces I draw have some of his influence.

I wouldn’t say I have much of an influence these days, I think in doing a career in comics you try to do your own style, your own way. I’m not sure what influences can be seen in my work these days. Moebius, some people say Frank Quitely, some people say Geof Darrow and I tell them, “I don’t think so.”

I guess I can understand the Darrow comparison, in regards to the lines and detail in both of your work.

Morazzo: Yes I’m sure, but it’s probably a coincidence. If you see Frank Quitely’s first works, it looks like Moebius.

It’s interesting that you mentioned Quietly, because of that All-Star Superman homage issue you did.

Prince: Frank Quitely is my second favourite comic book artist behind Martín. I can see the similarities.

Morazzo: [laughs] You probably have a crazy issue coming…

Prince: I see the similarities there because there’s something… I don’t have the vocabulary to identify what it is but there’s something about the faces and the way that the lines are clean and they have this movement to them. There’s something alive about the work.

I see the Quitely comparisons but I think the key to every artist is that no matter how many comparisons you get, you have your own style. Martín’s been good at creating something that when you look at it can only be one person that drew it.

I’d love to hear about your collaboration when it comes to the more experimental issues that the series is famous for, like the palindrome issue, or the crossword or three flavours one.

Morazzo: For #6, the Strange Neapolitan with the three parallel stories, Will drew the whole issue with stick figures and I gave it a three-dimensionality with the panels.

Prince: Martín is very patient when I send him the rough sketches I’ve drawn, which I know is offensive to him as a trained artist but I’m just trying to communicate my ideas to him in the way I know how.

Is there an issue that stands out to you as particularly challenging?

Morazzo: That one [#6] was challenging but all the hard work was made by Will because he had to figure out what happened in each panel and how to combine the three stories together.

Prince: It was challenging for Chris too, he had to bring life to each tier there.

Morazzo: I think the more challenging one was the palindrome because when drawing a comic book, you try to make the reader feel some movement. With that issue every movement could be read from one side to the other, so the character could not be walking straight to a place. He had to be standing with his shoulders midway so he could be read from one side to the other. That was kind of hard, I was so stressed when I finished it and read it backwards and found a mistake somewhere. I think it worked. There are some poses with some characters that are a bit strange but at the time it was the best I could do. I read it today and I think it works well. You mentioned the crosswords issue, I think it was my idea to make the panels squares much like a crossword, with white and black spaces. That was really fun to do and it was my own imposed challenge and I think it worked well. I miss those three guys [the backyard kids], I’ll put them in a background. I kind of forgot about those guys.

Prince: I think there’s a good point to mention that there’s not necessarily a consistency to the way that we work together. #13, the palindrome issue, was another one where I drew every single panel in stick figures to relay to Martín how the text and the images could be possibly reversed when getting to the centre of the issue and reading it backwards. He found better ways to structure those pages than my stick figures. With the crossword issue, it was a very loose idea and I sent him a little reference, like a Scott McCloud picture of another thing, and Martín came up with that whole structure of inserting these black spaces which acted as caesuras, as poetic pauses in storytelling. I’m sure every comic team says this, but it’s a real collaborative effort over at Team ICM. There’s really no mastermind. I’ve got an idea I want to explore and Martín is always willing to explore with me, and Chris is willing to try something that the two of us come up with, and the beautiful thing about Ice Cream Man is that sometimes we fail. And it’s not the best issue we can make. But the whole point is that you can just come back next issue, and it’s a new thing, a new experiment, and a new way that we’re trying to give something important to the reader, and maybe that time it will be successful. It’s the perfect way to work with other people, which is very free and open for all of us to try to be the best artists that we can within the confines of the comic book medium.

Martín, I’m sure you enjoyed drawing the talk show issue given you had fewer pages to draw than usual.

Morazzo: With Ice Cream Man in particular, I found a… I don’t know if you’d call it an obsession… in my previous work, whenever a background repeated, I left it blank on the page in the original art and then just duplicated it in the computer. With Ice Cream Man I make photocopies and lightbox the backgrounds. With that issue I drew the same background thirteen times, I think I drew thirteen pages.

Prince: I want it on the record that I did not ask Martín to do this. It was his decision.

Morazzo: It was my own obsession!

Prince: If he recreated the backgrounds I would not have noticed or cared, but this is his commitment and his thing.

Morazzo: It started in #9 I think, when we had Caleb and his dog and horse waiting in this landscape, making a fire and going to sleep. The next two or three pages were the same panel, and I said, “I cannot leave all the page blank.” So I lightboxed all the panels there. I find it a more relaxed way, you know? Because you take so much time duplicating in the computer and making everything fit. This is strange, but in my process, I finish all the pages, erase them and correct with whites, when I scan I feel like I’m there at the end of the race to deliver the issue… when I have to do a lot of post-production stuff like scanning, Photoshop and all, it’s like it never ends. When I have the original page, I scan everything and I’m almost there. It’s more relaxing for me that way even if lightboxing many repeated panels takes long… I kind of like doing it that way now. Especially with Ice Cream Man. I don’t do that with the other books I work on.

Prince: These are the small details that I think differentiate certain books from other books in a medium where there’s a lot per week for people to sample or to try or to subscribe to. That I have a partner who takes this extra time to do something that might not even be directly detectable to the reader, but that something in their subconscious is like, “Oh, it’s not the same background every time.” These things on the one hand aren’t important and on the other hand matter a lot and transfer to the reader as a more special and unique experience than if it’s repeated stuff over and over again. It’s a very crowded landscape that we’re publishing into, there’s so many good, different books that people can try out. How do we make our mark and do something that we feel is unique and special to our readership, to the people that for four or five years have chosen to go down this road with us? I feel like it’s all these little micro-decisions by Martín, by Chris, by me, that come together to elevate the book to something that can survive to #30.

Martín, how long does it take you to draw each issue? Is it consistent or does it vary from issue to issue?

Morazzo: It varies… I’m not really sure. Three to four weeks?

Prince: It depends on the emails that I send and the dates that I book!

Morazzo: I usually take three to four weeks, but sometimes I do it in two weeks. I’m working on another book besides Ice Cream Man now so it depends on how I’m working on the other book or how I deliver pages for the other book. Last year was pretty crazy, I drew 424 pages or so.

You don’t usually hear about that kind of output these days!

Morazzo: I made some bad decisions.

Prince: If you could clone Martín, you’d have thirty books per week on the shelves.

That’s an issue of Ice Cream Man waiting to happen.

Prince: The thing about the series is that we work in sets of four issues. Each trade paperback collection is four issues. What typically happens is, say we finish issues, take a month or two off, let the trade paperback come out. I’ll come up with some dates and ideas for what the issues are and usually the first two issues of the arc have a decent schedule where everyone isn’t feeling very pressured or rushed. After that we usually move some dates around and for the last two issues of that arc, we’ve got a month to a month and two or three weeks to create an issue from top to bottom, which I don’t think everyone can do but we’ve done it for five years now pretty successfully. We haven’t missed many of the deadlines that Image has given us. It’s not a system that I recommend anyone else take up but we’ve got a system.

Morazzo: It didn’t work too well with this new arc because on the second issue, I was late. I’m the one to blame. But we haven’t been late, we haven’t missed a date too long, right? We hold the book for two to three weeks and we have it. Some of the other books I’ve worked on have been really late, like two months late. It hasn’t happened with Ice Cream Man yet, I hope it doesn’t. I’m sure it won’t.

Prince: There are a couple of aspects to that. One is, Martín and I have an email chain with our colourist Chris who was really under the gun for the issue we just finished. We had to ask for a small extension to the deadline in order to hit our on-sale date. But ultimately, we’re not performing heart surgery here. No one’s life is being saved when we hit our deadlines. From a personal standpoint, Martín has three kids, Chris is working on seven or ten books…

Morazzo: I think you’re short!

Prince: If someone has to miss a date and we have to move our publication date back, I honestly don’t care. It’s more important to me that people feel like they’re not going insane because of their workload and that they’re feeling more joy than pressure when creating a piece of art, because that’s going to come out in the final product. We’ve been very good about hitting our deadlines but also, if the next issue that we’re working on is two months late, so be it. I don’t care.

Morazzo: I won’t allow that to happen! I don’t want to be late.

You mentioned that #24 was at one point going to be the end of the series. #25 has the first mention of the end of the series, which is ironic given that it’s a plane crash where the outcome is inevitable; it’s only going one way, heading in one direction. How do you feel about ending the book, is it going to happen soon?

Prince: It’s tough. There are a couple moving pieces there. Some of them are important and some of them are not all that important. One of the weird little things that’s popped up is that we’re releasing these hardcover deluxe editions which collect twelve issues at a time. In the name of symmetry we now have to work in twelve-issue increments to make sure that all of these match up with each other.

Morazzo: I’m not the only obsessive here!

Prince: So that’s an arbitrary way to dictate how long you should be telling a story but it is something that we consider, and something that we are thinking about in terms of the legacy of the book. How are they collected? How will these trade paperback and hardcover editions all live together? We read the numbers and make sure that everyone is feeling good and feeling compensated correctly for the level of which they’re working. As long as that is still working for everyone then I think we’re just gonna keep going until it’s clear to us that maybe it’s time to start turning it down. There was a point at around #17 or #18 that maybe we saw that point and thought, “Well, maybe this is the end of the road for us.” It’s been already such a longer run than we thought it would be, and we got this new life with #20. Right now, basically if we get past #36 then I want to go to #48.

#36 sounds good, you’d get three big hardcovers.

Prince: We’re definitely getting to #36. I have a feeling, unless things really change, that we’ll go past that too. We’ll see.

Since we’re on the topic of formats, I’ve found that print seems like the superior way to read this series. I read the series on my iPad through ComiXology and based on your guys’ instructions throughout the series, like to read the book at a certain angle perhaps, that issues like the palindrome or three flavours would read better in print than digital. Do you prefer print?

Prince: Mine is a complicated answer. My eyes are that of an eighty-year-old man, so I read all of my comics on ComiXology. And like many people, I’m upset at the app upgrade and the absorption and how the app has changed, because I need to zoom in on the panels in order to read the text. I read my books on an iPad Mini so I can read them in 18-point font. I really have grandpa eyes. But I write for the page turn, which is how I trained myself to write. The hope is that the person reading is reading the physical copy, because some of the cliffhangers are created such that something ends on an odd-numbered page, and then the answer is revealed on, what’s called in publishing, the verso, with the even-numbered page. So I want people to read Ice Cream Man physically, but I don’t read anything physically.

Morazzo: If you don’t mind, it works on the iPad. The only difference is the paper.

Prince: I guess that’s true.

Morazzo: Speaking for myself, I layout a page and have another page by its side and I think of them as a double page, even though I don’t work it as a double page. I love seeing pages next to each other so to me paper is the preferred mode.

Prince: Our upcoming issue is a good example of it. There’s this hallway dichotomy that Martín and Chris created. I won’t spoil too much but its people in these different rooms in a laboratory and the effect is only really achieved if you have the double-page spread open. Which is possible depending on how you’ve set your reading preferences on your iPad.

Morazzo: It’s too small, you need two iPads.

Prince: There are all these different things you have that go into the reading experience like printing quality. We did some last-minute work on the last issue to match the colours of the floor, which a lot of readers won’t notice but it’s stuff that we care about and want to correct. It’ll look different on the screen than it does on the off-set printed version. So ultimately the printed version is always, I think, the superior way to read it, except I’ll never read it that way because I can’t see that font.

Morazzo: You can use a magnifying glass, but that’s a bit sad.

Tell me about Haha. I didn’t read it as it was coming out so I was pretty surprised to see the blatant Ice Cream Man connection in #6. Was Haha always intended to connect to Ice Cream Man?

Prince: Haha required me to work with other artists, which is very fun but not my preference because I liked working with Martín and Chris. So I feel like my brain was naturally like, “How do I get back to my comfort zone? How do I get back to my way of telling stories?” Every artist on Haha did an amazing job and it was such a rewarding experience but between the thematics of it with the clowns and my desire to include Martín and Chris in everything that I do comics-wise, it just seemed natural to say, “Why don’t we explore this clown guy who appeared for two pages twenty issues ago and tell a whole story about him?” It just by luck worked out to be the perfect bookend to that series and also a really significant and, I think, powerful tie-in to the Ice Cream Man universe. It will not be the last time you see something like that happen in a series that isn’t Ice Cream Man.

Morazzo: I was surprised. I thought it was a brilliant idea that Will often has. It was a lot of fun because it was an extra issue of Ice Cream Man somehow without being an issue of Ice Cream Man, which we treated like one. Sometimes I see myself tagged in Haha reviews and I say, “Why did they put me here? Oh yeah, that issue.” Because it feels like Ice Cream Man to me. I think Will did something extraordinary there with really talented artists. I feel grateful for being able to be a part of it. It kind of felt like cheating making the issue, you know? Not cheating, like kids playing in a bad way.

It’s playful.

Morazzo: Yes!

Prince: I think cheating is a fun way to put it. It’s this other project with this other life with this other very discreet DNA and tone and focus with each issue being drawn by somebody else and being about a different clown. It’s a very different process to Ice Cream Man. To be able to make just a different issue of Ice Cream Man as the final issue of that does feel like we’re cheating, like we’re getting to have our cake and eat it too. Why don’t we make everything Ice Cream Man? Which in a way is what we’re doing. It’s kind of an echo of that Caleb thing, that everything is one thing. This whole project of writing is one whole connected effort to try to speak to people and say something and hopefully leave a small mark in this long, long line of storytelling.

As we talked about before, this series deals with some pretty heavy subject matter. Has that affected your working relationship in a way? Does working through these stories make your relationship stronger in any way?

Prince: Martín and I first started working together on The Electric Sublime. Who knows? Maybe people will see that again in some different form some time soon. Can’t say yes or no on that.

Morazzo: [laughs]

Prince: Martín and I had similar levels of stature in the comic world when that book came out. No one specifically really knew who we were, or cared. We had both done professional work we were proud of and that was on books at major publishers, but no one was waiting in line to talk to us. Martín and I did The Electric Sublime and IDW was kind enough to do these mini ashcans of the first issue. It was maybe seven or eight pages and I guess it was in… was it New York or San Diego, Martín?

Morazzo: It was New York.

Prince: It was in New York. He and I were just stuck at a table for two days straight, trying to convince people to come and pick up one of these ashcans from IDW. Over those two days we learned a lot about each other. Both of us have an interesting and challenging past and relationships with our families, how we deal with the idea of being fathers and husbands and all that sort of stuff. This [our Zoom call] is the first time I’ve seen Martín‘s face in… a year and a half? Two years maybe. Martín is one of my best friends. I talk to him many times during the week, every week, for probably seven years now. Some of the Ice Cream Man stuff specifically has come out of things that I’ve… this word is relative because I’m a very lucky person, but struggled with and shared with Martín. In terms of why I’m writing this particular thing and why this script is taking so long. Through that process I’ve also tried to honour Martín and his very particular past and story in small ways, not all the time. Because the issues are kind of heavy I think they naturally have brought us closer together. I’m also a very moody person so I’m very upfront with Martín and Chris when I’m like, “Hey, I’m not doing well. This script is taking longer than I thought it would because it’s specifically about something that I’m struggling with so please forgive me and give me a couple extra weeks to figure it out.” So naturally I think it’s brought all three of us closer together. We’re all good at nodding to each other on the page, like, “You’re a human being with shit going on and I will honour that with this weird, niche piece of art that we’re all making together.”

Morazzo: I agree with Will. Sometimes you kind of feel a bit strange because Will and Chris are some of my best friends and they live thousands of kilometres away. I’ve seen Will in the four New York Comic Cons and I haven’t seen him outside of that. I’ve seen Chris two different times I went to New York. Many times we talk about personal stuff beyond work of course, but we communicate mostly by email. I think that’s a mechanism that works pretty well. We don’t do Zoom calls to talk about issues or something like that, and feel close even though we don’t hear our voices often. Lately I feel like I want to get together and plan something, which we will. We started talking about this year’s New York Comic Con, so the Ice Cream Man team will be there all together and it will be awesome!

Prince: There are tons of creative teams that do the same thing we do, which is communicate across countries, across time zones, and have relationships that are primarily through email. The fact that so many of them create books that come to fruition and come out on the day that they were meant to, or even just a couple of weeks later, it’s amazing that it all happens and a lot of that it just the nature of the internet and how easy it is now to collaborate with people who are far away from you. Where Ice Cream Man is concerned, I feel like some creative teams get very lucky where there’s a mutual respect and no one is taking anything too seriously that they’re trying to find the joy in making art. We’re very lucky that the art we’re making is paying our bills, keeping us employed and busy, offering us opportunities outside of Ice Cream Man. It’s been a gift that keeps on giving. I think all comic creators are presented with this challenge of how do you maintain these relationships and create art across spaces and distance and time. In Team Ice Cream Man, we have Argentina, America, and Ireland, and wherever Good Old Neon lives. He won’t tell me. We care about each other as people first and comic creators second so if someone has to miss a deadline because they don’t feel well or something’s happened or life is hard, then so be it. Again, we’re not saving anyone’s lives by putting out a twenty-four page floppy comic on stands on a certain date. So we try to keep having fun and make interesting work, and make the next issue better than the previous issue. If we fail at doing that then say, “Oh, good thing we have a series where we get to try again next issue and it doesn’t matter what we did last issue.” It wasn’t by design, a lot of this just fell into place over time and with these weird structure of Ice Cream Man and the market, for whatever reason, responded to it in a pretty decent way. I hope it keeps going.

You probably haven’t discussed this yet since the book isn’t ending soon, but have you thought about working together after Ice Cream Man?

Prince: Even when I work with other artists, when I write a script and I’m thinking about how something will look on the page, the way that I see it is as drawn by Martín. I call it Morazzo Vision.

Morazzo: It’s trademarked.

Prince: I’ve written issues now for Vanesa Del Ray, Gabriel Hernandez Walta, Roger Langridge, and Zoe Thorogood who’s this rising, amazing star. All these amazing people. And every script that I’ve sent those people was envisioned in my head as drawn by Martín. As long as I don’t annoy him with weird issue ideas, I hope every project that I worked on has Martín involved in some way.