WE ALL LIKE ICE CREAM, MR. CHRIS!

Assorted schoolchildren reveal their favorite ice cream flavors in this picture book.

Mr. Chris, whose body consists of a tentacled teal torso, appears in his classroom: a plaid fuchsia-and-orange collage background framed with digital snowflakes. Nothing indicates recognizable physical reality. “WHAT KIND OF ICE CREAM DO YOU LIKE? I KNOW YOU HAVE A FAVORITE, DON’T YOU, MIKE?” Mr. Chris screams at a student. What follows is a psychedelic listing of ice creams, recited by a group of students. Though the structure of Fudgewilli’s text gestures toward the couplet, the rhymes are always slightly off: “chocolate/apocalypse,” “vanilly/gorilla,” “cookie dough/tootsie roll.” Each student’s physical form surprises; “mike” is a gremlinlike, multicolored child whose mirror images multiply around a photograph of mysteriously green chocolate ice cream. And “brittany robinson” is a creature with small bird feet drawn on a scrap of paper. Another child, “gary,” is a winged toe. The frightful faces are mostly unnerving but inoffensive, with the startling exception of “steven,” a humanoid character whose favorite ice cream is “water-otter-otter-melon” and whose eyeless pink face stares through a brown mask with large white lips. It certainly looks like blackface—though who the joke is on is unclear in this context-free, Bosch-like assembly of ghastly schoolkids. The light inanity of the text becomes intriguing when set inside the nightmarish realm of the convulsing, uncredited collages; hallucinogenic font changes; and intensifying color contrasts. Still, the story’s purpose remains inscrutable.

An artistically striking but enigmatic tale about ice cream.