Note: This essay was originally published in August 2020, in PanelxPanel #37, which was the Ice Cream Man special issue. I contributed a lot of articles to the early issues of PxP, partly because Hass is a friend, and partly because he would let me write whatever I wanted to.
This one came about because of another friend, Deniz Camp, who told me that I should read Ice Cream Man #18 because he thought I’d like it. So I read it, and it broke me. To say I “liked” it would be an understatement, because it was and remains the only comic that inspired me to write a fan letter to its creator to let them know how I felt about it.
I had meant to republish this one to my blog for a while, but my dad passed some months ago, in August 2024, so it feels like this is the time to place it in front of the public, in his memory. It remains the most personal non-fiction thing I’ve written.
For context, Ice Cream Man is a comics series by W. Maxwell Prince, Martín Morazzo and Chris O’Halloran that consists of individual single-issue short stories that are connected by tone rather than strung together as a single story, so you can jump into reading this essay, and Ice Cream Man #18, without having read #1-17, if you so desire. You don’t even need to have read Ice Cream Man #18 itself, but I highly recommend it, and this essay does technically “spoil” the issue.
Other than adding this preface, I haven’t edited or updated this essay in any way.
My grandfather and my youngest uncle – his son and my father’s younger brother – both died unworded.
My grandfather was senile for a few weeks before he passed. I didn’t like him much by then. When I was a child, he’d have peppermints at the ready for distribution among his grandchildren, which made him loveable enough, in a gruff sort of way. He’d give you a peppermint – all the kids called them ‘extra strong’s because those were the words written on the small white discs – and then he’d give you a kiss on the cheek, and his beard would scratch you. Some of the younger kids would avoid being kissed by him because it’d leave their tender cheeks red and itchy for hours, so tough was his beard to us.
Years later, when I was a teenager, he came to live with my family. He was a crotchety old man by then, unreasonably mean and rendered ill-tempered by his heart disease. In the afternoons, I would heat up his lunch for him, listening to him rant in the other room about how he knew I would get everything wrong, and I’d do all I could to resist spitting in his food.
Later, when I was an adult, my father asked me if I would be willing to help take care of my grandfather in what were likely his last days. One or the other of our relations would be around during the day, and there was a caretaker to feed him. I just had to be there, and sleep in that house in case anything happened during the night. And then, cautiously, my father told me that my grandfather wouldn’t give me any trouble, because he couldn’t speak any longer. He’d been senile for a few weeks, and nobody expected a reversal.
I was there for two days, watching my grandfather – a shadow of his former self, as they say – stare out into unspecific space. And then, at 6 a.m. on the third day, his caretaker woke me up, and my grandmother, and said, “I think he’s going.”
The three of us sat next to him, the caretaker checking his pulse – for some reason, before I wrote this, I always remembered this as him holding my grandfather’s hand, but clearly that wasn’t the case – and we watched my grandfather take his final soft breath, milky eyes gazing into nothing, not closing until they were closed for him.
My memories of him are layered through my life, bitter upon angry upon sweet, based on my experience of him. But then, to those memories have been added things I never went through, things my family told me, some of which have been built up in my head, given pictures and words, until I can’t entirely be sure what I know and what I simply remember.
Ice Cream Man #18 is about a man losing his memories as he slowly dies in a hospital bed, unable to speak. As he remembers the things that have happened to him, putting together words to build pictures of his memories, a gremlin enters them and makes them disappear, never to be remembered again.
Ice Cream Man #18 – “Watch As It All Recedes” – is a horror comic. But the gremlin isn’t the source of the horror. He is a symptom of it. The horror is watching a man unable to hold on to even the detritus of his life – a rough one though it might have been – as it’s taken from him.
If there is formal cleverness in this comic, it is in the way the captions are presented. A clean serif font represents the man’s thoughts as he tries to reconstruct the things that happened in his life. There are gaps when the man’s mind stutters, or when he struggles to remember people, or words, or even how to construct an English sentence. He begins:
The gremlin am
The gremlin is at it agon
again
The gremlin is at it againHe’s stealing mine
Stealing my memories
Gone they are gone they…
go
They’re going
and
gone.
There’s a shape to it – it’s a visual thing. It’s not simply telling us that a man is struggling to talk. It’s showing it to us by the way the words are put together. It’s not mimetic, but an abstract representation of how a process feels. You couldn’t do this quite the same way in prose or film.
It is simple, but beautiful. When I first read this, my breath caught, and I had to stop for a moment before I could continue reading. Deniz Camp had told me for a few months before then that I needed to read ICM #18, and in the first few panels, I knew exactly why.
But then there are the words themselves. This is not someone forgetting a complicated word. This is someone unable to conjugate the verb “to be”. There is something so fundamentally heart-breaking about that choice of word. This is a person forgetting how to be.
My memories of my youngest uncle are sweeter. A paraplegic since he was in his 30s, a quadriplegic by his end, he kept a sunny disposition far longer than anyone including him could have hoped for. He taught me how to play chess, he introduced me to some of my favourite novelists and short story writers, gifted me so many things over the years, and could always find something to talk about with me. He never married, never had children. Instead, he doted on his nieces and nephews, all of whom have their own beautiful memories of him. He did turn grumpy and angry towards the end, but in his case, unlike his father’s, no one begrudged him that.
Complications from a case of spinal meningitis he had suffered in his 20s had led to a slow deterioration of his motor functions. Over the next thirty years, he went from a mild limp in one leg to using a wheelchair to barely being able to sign his name until finally, he was restricted to his bed, requiring help to sit upright, needing to be fed and bathed by someone else – the primary source of his anger in his final months. He couldn’t do much by then, and I suggested I might get him an e-reader – he only had to press the one button, and he was still able to read – but he refused, because he couldn’t see the point.
In his last months, he often asked me to visit. My other uncle – the brother between my father and my youngest uncle – would hold the phone up to his ear, and I would promise him I’d visit soon. But I never would, until my father told me that I had to go visit, and it wasn’t optional. I went, and mostly avoided spending time with him. He could tell, of course, and before I left, we did have a complete conversation, but it remained perfunctory. Nothing like closure.
I would see him once more. For the last many weeks of his life, the degeneration had reached his brain. When I visited, he remembered my name a couple of times, but the rest of the time, there was no recognition. Soon, he couldn’t speak. And one day, while I was at a party with my friends, my father called and told me that my uncle had passed. I cried for a while, and then gently, my friends, who either knew about my uncle or had met him, prodded me for memories of him. Talking about him didn’t bring him back to life, of course, but it kept him alive for a little longer.
A few years later, my other uncle and I were talking about what it was like for him to be caretaker for his younger brother, and I told him how I didn’t want to visit towards the end, because I felt it would tarnish my memory of him as a younger man. And, of course, I had known it was a selfish thing to do. My uncle said he was glad that I visited at least once that my late uncle could remember – because after his death, we could, together, construct memories of him as we wanted to remember him, but while he was alive, it was more important for us to be there for him, however painful it might be for us.
From within, it must feel so different as things recede. In the end, you can only watch.
Ice Cream Man #18 is a horror comic. And yet, I think of it with such fondness. It feels like a catharsis, instead of a trigger. Over 24 pages, we watch the man’s children reflect his life back to him, even as he forgets the actual incidents within it. Trapped inside an unmoving body, he is helpless to prevent his children from repeating his mistakes or making their own.
Why does it make me feel good every time I read it, then? Because it’s a safe place to feel all the complicated things I feel about someone losing their mind and their identity little by little. Fiction creates that space to feel things you might be scared of feeling. You open the book, and then, when it gets to be too much, you can close it.
When I mentioned to a friend that I was going to be writing about one of my favourite comics of this year, she asked, “Is it the ice cream one?” Because that’s how much larger this comic has loomed for me than any other this year. The way it is written, drawn, coloured and lettered, it creates a space, not only to feel things, but to occupy, to fill in gaps.
In almost every issue of ICM, Prince and team hone in on the one sentiment they mean to explore, and leave everything out of the story that they can. It’s a mode of creation that works well for short stories – you can sustain a tone and mood without certain details only for so long. But for that duration, they give you bits and pieces, and you fill in the rest with your experience of things – of life, of emotions. You fill it with your memories. This also means, then, that just how much you loved a particular issue perhaps depends on how much you could relate to it. That is maybe why ICM #18 feels like it was written just for me.
The reason I connect with ICM #18 so strongly, despite everything else I’ve written in this essay, is that I’ve been watching my father recede for some years now. He had a stroke, which led to brain damage and vascular dementia – a slow loss of faculties. For a while he just had trouble remembering random words, but now he’s lost all self-reliance, and can’t be left alone for more than a couple of hours at a time. He speaks in short sentences, avoiding speech when he can, because he has trouble putting thoughts together.
My dad taught me how to read from old Indian comics. He let me read his James Hadley Chase novels when I was eight – probably his best inappropriate dad choice – and he loved the fact that I wrote, because he used to write himself. He’s never read any of my fiction – it was never his kind of thing – but for a long time, I’d send him essays or articles I wrote that he might like. He wanted me to be a robust, sporty boy, and I disappointed him on that count, but then I started going on motorcycle road trips, like he used to before his illness, and he still grins when anyone mentions that.
I was angry with him for a very long time when his health started failing, because I saw it as something he’d done to himself. I’m not angry anymore, but it’s still a complicated business, because you can have a feeling, and then time passes, and you can’t carry it in the same way, because there are now layers over it, and it isn’t the same feeling anymore. And then I think of how my father might feel – there’s the life he’s built, and outside his control, some of the layers started to vanish, and the edifice doesn’t stand quite right any longer.
My father has largely retreated from creating a new life, content with standing still among the things he has accrued so far. But then, as I watch, some of those go away too. Last week, I was listening to a song he used to sing often when he was younger, and I felt a sudden surge of love for him. So I called him, and told him I was listening to one of his favourite songs. But he couldn’t remember what song I was talking about. Over the next ten minutes, I had to help him build back his memory of the song, and some recognition sparked, but he no longer remembered how much he loved it. I must now remember it for him.
It is at moments like this that I feel that maybe the place he is in, and where he is going, is not the horror. Maybe the horror is to watch it happen. But that’s self-serving. Maybe none of it is a horror. Maybe it’s a mercy.
ICM #18 is ambivalent about what, specifically, is scary about the events within it. Is it the process of losing memories? Is it that despite your forgetting it, your children will carry your life with them as a burden? Is it better to remember how badly you might have messed things up for your loved ones, or to forget it? When the gremlin takes away his memories, the man doesn’t want it to happen. But once it has happened, it isn’t there anymore. The good, or the bad. Nothing lasts forever. And perhaps that’s not such a bad thing.
During the pandemic-induced lockdown, I’ve been helping my niece with her English, and at the moment, we’re struggling with the various conjugations of the verb “to be”. “Is” is clear, as is “was”. But to “have been” is a struggle. How can it be in the present, she asks me, when it has already happened? As an adult who hasn’t had to grapple with the idea since I was a kid myself, it is difficult to explain. It is an unspecified time before now, I tell her, but now is the time in which we’re speaking about it.
In the end, the man doesn’t remember who he was, all he is left with is the fact that he was. From the beginning of the comic to the end, it returns to the word “to be”.
how lucky, me
he tells us,
to have been.
