Mono Mondays: "The Lost Ice Cream"

On Mondays, we like to support our resident artist, Mono!  They're an up-and-coming scribbler of things dark and weird, and we consider ourselves lucky to have leeched onto— er, formed a mutually beneficial relationship with them.  You can watch Mono hard at work creating various pieces on their YouTube channel.  For those who don't feel like watching digital paint getting splashed around, we'll be showcasing a different piece of theirs right here every Monday.

This week, we're taking a look at an origin story of sorts.

It started with a classic take on an even older rhyme.  Mono isn't the first to think about why we're all screaming for ice cream, and they won't be the last.  They might be one of the first to take the idea of sentient ice cream and incorporate it broadly into their artwork as a variety of oozy monsters, though.

"That's... how I started making slimes," Mono explains, "melting ice cream scoops with different, cartoonish expressions."  From there, Mono gradually worked them into tiny little mascots; in several works, Mono's signature is held by some variety of slime.  "[The] point is," they add, "I went back to my roots with some Neapolitan for this one."

Not to date them too badly, but Mono wasn't around for the downfall of the U.S.S.R.  It's a shame, really.  They would have gotten a kick out of a joke like, "In Soviet Russia, ice cream eats you!"