It’s been nearly a year and a half since DC Comics published the jaw-dropping finale to James Tynion IV and Alvaro Martinez Bueno’s The Nice House on the Lake.
The 12-issue, Eisner-winning limited series followed a group of 11 people who are invited to an idyllic house in the Wisconsin countryside for a long weekend vacation by their mutual friend Walter. It’s only after arriving, however, that they discover the terrible truth: Walter is an alien, the rest of the human race has been extinguished, and none of the house guests are allowed to leave.
This July, Tynion and Bueno return with The Nice House by the Sea, a limited series follow-up to The Nice House on the Lake, this time centering on another group of guests at another luxurious house — this one patterned after an exotic Mediterranean villa — assembled by another shape-shifting extraterrestrial named Max. There’s a few crucial differences, however: Unlike Walter’s group, none of the guests are particularly friends with one another, and each of them willingly chose to survive in paradise while the rest of humanity burned in alien fire.
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Image: James Tynion IV, Álvaro Martínez Bueno/DC Comics
The Nice House on the Lake was, and remains, one of the most enthralling serialized mysteries of the past two years. Lawrence Kasdan’s The Big Chill, by way of Michael Schur’s The Good Place, meets Stephen King’s It, the series was an impeccably well-paced, apocalyptic drama. Tynion and Bueno delved deep into the dark secrets of their cast and neatly foreshadowed the story’s ultimate conclusion along the way; a breathtaking and ominous cliffhanger that opened the door for even more fraught mysteries and revelations to come.
Polygon was given a look at the first issue of The Nice House by the Sea ahead of its publication next month, and it strikes a surprising balance between mirroring the narrative and visual structure of the original series, and contorting its apocalyptic thought-experiment of a original premise into ever more horrifying shapes. If The Nice House on the Lake was a story about love and the ways in which it can be twisted into something awful, The Nice House by the Sea establishes itself as a story about how the absence of love makes monsters of us all.
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Image: James Tynion IV, Álvaro Martínez Bueno/DC Comics
The amount of craft and care put into the artwork and writing of The Nice House by the Sea, thankfully, in no way reflects the absence afflicting its principal characters. Bueno’s artwork is remarkable as always, contrasting the wooded rural splendor of the original series’ setting with a picturesque biome of breathtaking vistas and ostentatious architecture.
Because this group of house guests are willing participants in Max’s alien experiment, and by extension accessories in the eradication of human civilization itself, Tynion is able to play with the out-of-this-world technologies he and Bueno initially introduced in The Nice House on the Lake, but that were largely hidden from Walter’s unsuspecting guests until late in the story. From collectively deciding the weather of the day to reshaping your appearance and physique at will, how far would you go before you could no longer recognize yourself as a human being?
As far as how the series will go about addressing this question, as well as how the participants of Max’s experiment will learn and react to the aftermath of The Nice House on the Lake, we’ll have to wait until the first issue of The Nice House by the Sea is released on July 27th.