Exclusive: Take a Lick of Ice Cream Man’s Sinister Upcoming Variant Covers

Ice Cream Man has emerged as a Paste favorite throughout 2018, using its loose framing scenario—the titular Ice Cream Man is much, much worse than he seems—to tell wildly varied, occasionally experimental, often melancholy (or downright depressing) short stories. One of the great shames of Western comics is that we lack a healthy market for ongoing anthologies or story collections, which makes Ice Cream Man something of a horror-adjacent miracle, sitting somewhere between George Saunders and The Twilight Zone.

Writer W. Maxwell Prince, artist Martin Morazzo and colorist Chris O’Halloran can’t claim all the credit though. In addition to Morazzo and O’Halloran’s uncanny main covers, each issue of the series has been graced by stunning variant covers from the likes of Frazer Irving, Christian Ward and Vanessa R. Del Rey. For the upcoming third arc, which kicks off with January’s issue #9, the assembled variant-cover artists are trying something a little different: they’re each reinterpreting a previous Ice Cream Man cover, now with a much more sinister bent. Check out the exclusive reveal of Kyle Smart, Juan Ferreyra, Babs Tarr and Tula Lotay’s covers below, and be sure to keep an eye out for additional Ice Cream Man coverage from Paste in the coming months.

Ice Cream Man #9 Variant Cover Art by Kyle Smart

Ice Cream Man #10 Variant Cover Art by Juan Ferreyra

Ice Cream Man #11 Variant Cover Art by Babs Tarr

Ice Cream Man #12 Variant Cover Art by Tula Lotay