Issues 1 and 2 of Rob Jackson's It's A Man's Life In The Ice Cream Business are now available to purchase at his site.

Though certainly not without story-telling guile, Rob Jackson is a cartoonist who reliably works a lack of inventive telling to his advantage when producing stories with absurd complications. Here, however - where the autobiographical subject matter is the relatively mundane business of food-selling at rural markets - the 'this happened, then this happened' approach is not so complementary, and edges the pamphlets toward pedestrian diary-comics territory.

Vitally though, It's A Man's Life In The Ice Cream Business is charming, folksy stuff, and leaves you not just with a hankering for black peas and whinberry-flavoured ice cream, but with a piqued curiosity about the heritage of Jackson's livelihood, too. There's a satisfying sense that Jackson - who at one juncture loses then regains his soup confidence - is preserving more than just memories and the odd recipe.