One of my favorite issues released this year, absolutely worth picking up. Read Full Review

I Am What I Am (A Sonnet) is a very relatable short story, but not quite what I expect from Ice Cream Man. There's nothing truly horrifying about the prospect, at least not to me. I see what they were going for, but it just wasn't quite so effective.

True Original is a fun little story. I tend to like God-bashing because I'm just an edgy ol' atheist. But there wasn't much to this until the end when they start listing off the plights and monotonies of modern life, that was fun and funny. Side note, it doesn't really matter, but the "women make 80 cents on every dollar that men make" part is just straight up wrong. It's an ever persistent factoid that really starts to grate on me. The idea behind it is that, collectively, with the average of all jobs taken into account, women earn 80 percent of what men do. That can be accounted for by the types of jobs women work vs the types that men work, the amount of time women work as opposed to men, etc. It is not comparing two people, one man and one woman, with the same job at the same standing, and how they are paid.

Conventions of Mikes is an interesting story. It's surprisingly light-hearted for Ice Cream Man. But I guess in the midst of a pandemic, it is better to have a nice story than a dour one. There's a hint of that usual Ice Cream Man tone to it, but it's slight. Honestly, it's one of my favorite stories from this collection, even so.

Secret Origins: Pinky Ring is probably my favorite story in the entire collection. I was not a big fan of the Confection Comics Superman parody issue a while back, so my expectations were very low. However, this is a hilarious story. I genuinely love it.

Seroquel is something more like I expect from Ice Cream Man. This was a very well-done story, and I don't have much to say about it beyond that.

Terminal Ride is one of my favorites. It's very inventive and I just had a good time reading it.

Nature Calls is a very pessimistic, dark story. This is also in line with what I've come to expect from Ice Cream Man, but with maybe a little more pizzazz. It was pretty good.

Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin is great. It captures the tone and mood of the pandemic very, very well. It's very depressing.

Creature Causeway is just sort of a "what the fuck?" I expect good things from Al Ewing, always. I expect something smart and meaningful, and this is just so brute force and ridiculous. It made me laugh a lot.

Small is very good as well. It's very much a condensed Ice Cream Man story.

I usually can't stand anthology collections like this, but man, most of these were great. And the ones that weren't great, were at least good. I never felt like I was spending too much time reading this. It's very enjoyable. more