Timmy Lala's Ice Scream #1 - Ka-Blam Printing

TIMMY LALA'S ICE SCREAM No. 1, October 2018

Proudly publicised by creator Bradley Golden as “a one shot horror comic about delicious, sweet murder” during its successful “Kickstarter” in July 2018, this twenty page periodical undoubtedly lives up to its pre-print promise with its plot’s disturbing premise of the local ice-cream man being a deranged serial killer who murders innocent men, women and children so as to use “their body parts as new and delicious ice-cream toppings.” Indeed, it’s hard to imagine a more disturbing narrative than that offered by this title’s writer as well-intentioned Miami-based mothers help shepherd their all-too innocent off-spring towards Thomas Wright’s truck and pay for their little darlings tasty treats, never suspecting for a moment that one of the ingredients of his delicious carbohydrate-filled frozen dessert may well be the bodily remains of his latest hapless fatality; “You know I make all my ice cream with love and care.”

Fortunately however, this book’s storyline isn’t simply just a straightforward tale about a homicidal maniac chopping up random inhabitants of Florida just for the fun of it, with the vendor’s motivation proving to be a far more complicated affair than that once he returns home and continues to torture his two-timing wife, Lucy, in his home’s dark basement. Bound to a chair and gagged, it soon becomes evident that “Thomas’ latest victim” will be missing more than her regular local yoga class unless her new sweetheart, Aaron, can mount a timely rescue and save her from the impressive array of sharpened knives with which the petrified woman’s mentally disturbed husband plans to slaughter her with.

Encouragingly, just such a liberation appears about to occur too when Lucy’s “secret lover” attempts to gain entry to Wright’s eerie house by posing as a representative of the “Heavenly Palace of Jehovah’s Witness.” But those bibliophiles anticipating a happy ending will be completely wrong-footed by what Golden pens next, as the Ice Cream man proves more than a murderous match for “the black guy at the door” and subsequently slits the throat of his shocked spouse whilst she’s still reeling from the disbelief of him killing her new partner on their very doorstep.

Similarly as successful as this comic’s delivery of its spine-chilling surprises, is Andrey Lunatik’s extremely characterful artwork, which genuinely imbues the bespectacled maniac with just the sort of humorous quirkiness this book needs to set it apart from being just another ‘slasher’ story, and keep the reader wanting to see more of its leading cold-hearted character. In fact, it’s easy to see just why Bradley wanted to use a portion of the $2,733 pledged “to help bring this project to life” to compensate the Russian (and the rest of this publication's creative team) for “putting out some great work”.

‘First published on the "Dawn of Comics" website.'

The regular cover art of "TIMMY LALA'S ICE SCREAM" No. 1 by Helmut Rancho