This year’s best comic book villain is friend, betrayer, and alien flesh-tornado
Imagine your childhood best friend. A bit awkward, a little weird and intense; well-liked by all, but only a few can claim to truly know well. A confidant; the best man at your wedding, a sympathetic ear and ever-eager helping hand who’s never farther than a phone call away.
Now, imagine that friend was in fact a ghoulish alien “flesh-tornado” masquerading as a human being in a bid to exterminate humanity, and they’ve chosen you as one of a handful to survive. For the protagonists of The Nice House on the Lake, writer James Tynion IV and artist Alvario Martinez Bueno’s horror series at DC Comics, this hypothetical is an all-too-terrifying reality.
To sum it up through comparison: The Nice House on the Lake is basically Lawrence Kasdan’s The Big Chill by way of Michael Schur’s The Good Place and Stephen King’s It; an apocalyptic mystery thriller that reads like a better version of Lost as told through the medium of comics. The focal point of these disparate influences is Walter, the series’ antagonist and one of the most intriguing comic book villains in recent memory.
The Nice House on the Lake Vol. 1, which collects the first six issues of the 12-issue limited series and is out this week, opens on the image of a woman wrapping a bandage around her head, the background ablaze in a glow of orange and red. She tells the story of how she first met Walter, a friend of a friend, who invited her and a small group of other close-ish acquaintances to vacation at a beautiful lake house in Wisconsin for a week during the precarious upturn of summer 2021.
After they arrive, however, they soon realize the horrible truth: Walter is not human; this trip was the culmination of a decades-spanning plot to eradicate the human race; and
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