“Maybe This is a New Series Now?”
Hello all! Taking the place of a regular blog post is something kind of new this week. Adding to my rotation of things I can throw up without too much hassle, along with that “photobomb” and “Spectral Crown” (rip) stuff, this is kind of a short recommendation for some sort of media thing I’ve consumed, a place I’ve been, or thing I’ve done in the last few weeks that I think is worth writing about, but I don’t have the time to do a longer, in-depth analysis or bigger commentary on it. It’s kind of like me saying, “Hey! Look! Listen!” about some sort of cool thing I’ve found, like a child discovering a shiny rock on a beach, or an explorer unearthing some sort of ancient temple, but not nearly as exciting. You probably get the idea of how this is gonna go.
And we’re gonna start the first version of this with The Nice House on the Lake, which is actually a 2021 horror comic book series by James Tynion IV and Álvaro Martínez Bueno. I know that comic books are kind of “in” right now, what with the Marvel Cinematic Universe being one of the highest-grossing media franchises of all time, but I feel like that “in”-ness almost exclusively applies to superhero comics. Sure, everything else gets boost because the supers are doing so well, but even though Nice House is published by DC, I don’t think it’s seeing the same kind of traction as, say, the newest issues of Iron Man or Black Panther. Not to say it isn’t seeing traction, of course; for those on the inside, Nice House is well-known. I’m not breaking new ground here, exactly. But I want to recommend it anyway!
By the way, I recommend going into this series blind, so if you think you’ll read it, stop here! Light spoilers on the way! Just know that I think this series is great (and still on-going!) so get in while it’s hot. DC just released a Volume One graphic novel print with the first six issues, and the next six are gonna be out over the rest of 2022, I think. So grab it now!
Much like with mother!, I went into Nice House totally blind. I knew that it was highly recommended horror reading, and I knew that I used to be into comics but found it too expensive of a hobby (go figure, judging by how much I spend on video games), so I thought that maybe a limited-run series like this would be a good way to ease myself back into it. I’d been meaning to start picking them up again, anyway (I never did finish Manhattan Projects or Great Pacific, like I really wanted to back in the day). And I was right! This is a great way to get me back into reading comics, and I’ve only spent twenty-five dollars so far! But, also like mother!, my expectations were totally in the wrong place. Which is cool! It’s nice to be surprised.
I came into Nice House expecting a combination of cosmic horror and supernatural thriller, with something about a bunch of skeletons in the basement of the house, both literally and figuratively, and maybe stuff about raising a cult and a temple in the lake or something like that. I kept hearing about it on Horror Twitter and such, so I figured that once the collected edition came out, I might as well jump in. I really had no idea what it was about, going in, besides that it’s about a bunch of people in a house on a lake, and shit goes crazy. Let me tell you, it is some of those things, but it is very much not what I expected. I went in expecting Cabin in the Woods and instead got The Good Place with more body horror, which was some pretty significant whiplash (that Good Place comparison is pretty apt, I promise you). And while there are lots of mysteries, Nice House wastes zero time in showing you exactly what it wants to do and exactly what it wants to be. There is no beating around the bush here, and I really respect that.
Horror stuff has this issue with starting out too slow, and it takes forever to build up to the really good stuff. Not this one. Five pages in and bam, the world has ended. The people in this house are perhaps the only surviving humans left. What does this mean? What’s happened to the outsider world? Can they survive the apocalypse? Can they survive each other? Nice House‘s strengths rely on otherworldly art from Martínez that really emphasizes the “horror” in body horror along with a wide variety of color palettes, and deft character development from Tynion that somehow manages to make twelve separate characters all feel at least distinguishable, if not always identifiable. I mean, this series has got literally twelve characters from the very first issue, but it does all the front-loading so quickly that it’s possible to keep track of everyone without getting too lost. Which is a task that, in less nimble fingers, would be impossible or at the very least terribly unwieldy.
I will say, perhaps the series plays its hand too quickly, and I guessed at a few of the “big twists” within the first three issues or so, because now that I’m past the collected version and at the brand new single issues, I don’t know where the series is going to go, which is perhaps a good thing? But also a bit odd, since the first issues hooked me because of the mysteries that I now know the answers to. I do know that it ends in flames (the very first page of the very first issue makes this clear), and I suspect I already know why, and I am going to stick around to find out, but it does move rather quickly in a couple of regards that I found to be… less fulfilling, perhaps? I don’t know. I’m not going to give any more spoilers or even really give more of an analysis or my opinion of it, though, because I’m gonna hold out til the very end for that.
But either way, it is something that I’ve been reading and I think that The Nice House on the Lake is Something You Should Read. It made me stop playing Elden Ring long enough to look at some paper again, which should be recommendation enough.
