Ice Cream Man #45 [Review]
Forty-five issues in, and Prince still knows how to make you uncomfortable
If you have been reading Ice Cream Man for any length of time, you already know the contract: Prince hands you something that looks like a familiar genre exercise, lets you get comfortable, and then methodically pulls the floor out from under you. Issue #45 holds up that end of the bargain. The title is not subtle about its inspirations: "The Window in the Back of the Apartment" is a Hitchcock riff wearing its influences openly, and it earns that right.
Our protagonist is Martin, a photographer laid up with a broken leg after getting clipped by a car while trying to photograph a robbery. Stuck in his apartment with nothing but time and a telephoto lens, he trains the camera on the building across the way and starts documenting the lives playing out in each lit window. Prince gives Martin a caption-box voice that is flat, almost clinical. "I like to watch," he tells us, not as a confession but as a simple statement of fact. That comfortable self-possession of someone who has made peace with an uncomfortable habit is what interests us in Martin to begin with.
Morazzo's layouts are doing heavy lifting throughout. There is a full-page spread early in the issue presenting the entire facade of the apartment building, each window its own illuminated rectangle, each tenant sealed inside their own private moment. It's a piece of genuine visual architecture, and it pulls off something quietly essential: it makes you do exactly what Martin is doing. In reading the comic naturally, you find yourself scanning each window, picking out the details, and constructing your own stories. The reader becomes the voyeur without being told to. Morazzo never lets you off the hook, either. His figures carry a slightly angular, almost woodcut quality that keeps the book from feeling slick, and that deliberate roughness makes the observation feel earned rather than voyeurism made pretty. These are real people being watched through a real lens, and the grit in the linework keeps reminding you of that.
O'Halloran's colors carry the emotional register from scene to scene. The warm amber tones of Martin's apartment give way to the cooler, more muted palette of the building across the street. When the violence arrives, and it arrives with Ice Cream Man's characteristic abruptness, O'Halloran floods the panel in a flat burning orange-red that reads like a warning label.
Prince manages the pacing of Martin's unraveling with real control. The murder happens fast, one panel of blazing chaos and then we're on the other side of it, watching Martin try to convince anyone who will listen. The police are skeptical. His nurse thinks the broken leg is affecting his brain. The film from his camera comes back blank. That spiral, the witness nobody believes, is well-traveled suspense territory, and Prince uses it as a pressure valve before steering the final act into the kind of fourth-wall-aware meta-narrative the series has always kept in reserve. The question posed early in a caption box, "why do we find any of this interesting?", lands very differently by the time you hit the last page…and that reframing is the payoff.
It’s precisely this tension has always been part of what Ice Cream Man is doing, and Prince has never once pretended otherwise. Forty-five issues in, this book keeps finding new angles on its own premise, new ways to make the familiar feel wrong and the wrongness feel inevitable. Morazzo and O'Halloran remain ideal collaborators for Prince's particular brand of dread, and this issue gives both of them room to do some of their most compositionally interesting work on the title. The Ice Cream Man keeps the truck running, and the music hasn't gotten old yet.
Ice Cream Man #45
A sharp, unsettling Hitchcock riff that uses Morazzo's masterful layouts to make voyeurs of its readers before pulling the rug out in classic Ice Cream Man fashion.
