ICE CREAM MAN transforms into card game THE MORTAL COIL SHUFFLE

Image Comics has announced Ice Cream Man: The Mortal Coil Shuffle, a new addition to W. Maxwell Prince, Martín Morazzo, Chris O’Halloran, and letterer Good Old Neon‘s horror series, billed as a “one-shot tale told across a deck of 55 cards, rather than within the periodical pages of a traditional floppy comic book.” Due out this fall, the card game will purportedly “be printed once and once only — no second printings, no new runs, and never collected in a trade of any kind. It will exist — and then, like magic — it won’t.”

Ice Cream Man: The Mortal Coil Shuffle is a beautiful, custom-designed deck of cards (featuring custom backs and a custom box, too!). All art is, as ever, by Ice Cream Man stalwarts Morazzo, Chris O’Halloran, and Good Old Neon. Some cards will tell part of the story; while other cards cast inscrutable spells on unwitting characters; and some must be joined with other cards to form a complete piece of art (the card deck’s version of a “spread.”). It’s a first-of-its-kind comic experiment, and also, perhaps, the last…

Launched by the creators in 2018, Ice Cream Man is a semi-anthology revolving around the mysterious title character (who goes by the name Rick), who pulls the strings in stories that range from the darkly comedic to the horrifying. The Mortal Coil Shuffle marks the first spin-off for the comic to materialize, following a TV show that was in development for the infamously shortlived streaming service Quibi, and a film version that Alfred Gough and Miles Millar signed on to write late last year. Morazzo comments, “I love storytelling challenges, so you can say I’ve always been very pleased with Ice Cream Man. Now, more than 44 issues in, it’s awesome we’re still trying cr*zy, never-done-before, stuff!”

Prince describes the project as a tribute to a neighbor who taught him to play the card game Gin Rummy as a child. He recalls, “When I was nine, I contracted chickenpox. And the only person available to watch me while sick was my German next-door neighbor — a lovely woman named Inge, who, over time, would become a sort of surrogate grandmother to me. She taught me how to play Gin Rummy that be-pocked week, and if I close my eyes now I can still hear her shuffling the deck, tapping her gigantic press-on nails onto the table between drags of her extra-long Kool cigarettes. The cards were alive for me back then, and so this little Ice Cream Man experiment is dedicated to Inge: let’s see if we can’t bring some cards to life one more time!”

The Mortal Coil Shuffle will be released on October 1, and you can check out mock-ups of the cards (including their back design) and the box they’ll be sold in below. In the meantime, issue #44 of the comic (which runs irregularly) will arrive next week, on July 23, and issues #45-47 are solicited to run monthly afterwards from September 10, to November 5. A trade (Vol. 11), collecting issues #40-44, will hit stores on September 17.