By Zack Quaintance — If you’ve found your way to something so esoteric as this website, there’s a fairly good chance you know that there’s been a pause in the distribution of weekly comic books for the first time basically ever, at least for this long of a period. With American sheltering in place to flatten the curve of the virus, there have been challenges with printing comics, distributing comics, and selling comics. 

This has created a number of needs, but chief among them is the need to support comic book stores. Less pressing than that is the simultaneous need for readers of comics to experience some new content while stuck at home (although, I know for me personally I have a massive backlog of both physical and digital books I’m plenty busy reading through). Still, newness feels exciting and normal, and there’s a great something to be said for it. It’s with these two needs in mind that we now have Quarantine Comix.

Quarantine Comix is a set of weekly short comics from the creative team of the Image Comics series, Ice Cream Man (which was my personal favorite comic of 2019). Yes, writer W. Maxwell Prince, artist Martin Morazzo, colorist Chris O’Halloran, and letterer Good Old Neon are making new stories, set in the Ice Cream Man world with the same compelling and sinister sensibilities. Released weekly, they cost $1.99, with half of the proceeds going to the Book Industry Charitable Foundation (BINC), which supports local comic shops. This has the dual purpose of helping to alleviate both of the aforementioned needs.

The cause is great, obviously, and so the next question for us here today is how are the actual stories? Through three issues so far, they have totaled 12 pages, and they’ve had much diversity between them. We’ve seen William Shakespeare, we’ve seen the Garden of Eden, and we’ve seen the Convention of the Mikes (which I found especially poignant and clever). And you know what? These comics are very very good. If there’s any book in direct market comics tailored for this terrifying and claustrophobic time as well as an abbreviated, almost ad hoc format, it is without question Ice Cream Man.

While Ice Cream Man is an anthology horror series, one of the questions it consistently raises has to do with how much terror can and should be inherent to everyday life. There wasn’t a pandemic issue of Ice Cream Man, but the idea of being trapped at home with one’s family as a potentially-lethal threat rages unseen outside is very much in line with the subject matter the book does tackle. That’s all a means of saying the lens through which these stories approach the world has been very welcomed in these short comics, all of which are crafted with the same creativity, bold approach to form, and top-tier execution as the larger book. And you can check them all out right now for the price of a relatively modest donation to a great cause. 

Overall: Perhaps no modern comic is better suited for our times than Ice Cream Man. This charitable short comics project is must-read material right now as we all shelter at home with our frustrations and anxieties. 10/10

Ice Cream Man Presents Quarantine Comix #1 - #3
Writer: W. Maxwell Prince
Artist: Martin Morazzo
Colorist: Chris O’Halloran
Letterer: Good Old Neon
Publisher: Quarantine Comix
Price: $1.99 each
Buy Them: Online here!

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Zack Quaintance is a tech reporter by day and freelance writer by night/weekend. He Tweets compulsively about storytelling and comics as Comics Bookcase.