The Nice House by the Sea is a dream vacation at the end of the world with the worst people you know
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.
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
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