The Nice House on the Lake: the Deluxe Edition

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Shout-Out: In Issue 4, David is wearing Ferris Bueller's Iconic Outfit, having apparently requested it from Walter via the notepad. The pieces are there to make The Nice House on the Lake, Volume 1 a fun book but James Tynion IV fails to assemble them into anything more than a narrative that’s unfortunately more often boring than not. You’d need to get us better invested in the characters. Do cool time jumps, or leap to other cells of lab rats, introduce us to other Walters more/less sentimental than Walter-proper (and their little cells too). Let the walls of the other cells touch and clarify the scale, where we really are. Show us the world burning for real. I dunno. But the form and the delivery both need a refresh. The explanation for what is happening is.. unexciting..? I believe the ending of this volume is supposed to be a kind of twist, and it's more of a sigh, really. Intrepid Reporter: Sam 'the Reporter' is the one most determined to solve the mystery of the House and its separation from the world.

Something I enjoy about James Tynion IV is he aims to be very unsettling and hits you were it hurts, such as knowing everyone you’ve ever known or loved died in an absolutely horrific and gruesome apocalypse (Anderson Cooper gets singled out as someone who literally melts on live tv). In both series of his I’ve read now the art does not shirk away from depicting the most horrible things you can image. Like this: This reads like it's supposed to be a character piece, but we only get to see the characters in reference to Walter. I know almost nothing about the characters.But I did enjoy the various aspects of the story like the weird sculptures scattered around the compound, and the questions arising from the reveals: why is there a symbol for each person, why can no-one remember travelling to the house, how is the world ending and why, and, of course, Walter himself. I wonder if the name is derived from Walter Tevis, the author of, among others, The Man Who Fell to Earth? Walter gives off a vibe similar to Newton from that novel. Spontaneous Human Combustion: How the end of the world happens, apparently. Ryan sees through social media that people are just going up in flames. There are bigger firestorms, too, but they are probably caused by people on fire. The reason for this is Walter's "people" — one social media post even says "THERE IS SOMETHING IN THE SKY BEHIND THE FIRE. LOOK BEHIND THE FIRE, AT THE COLOR THAT HURTS YOUR EYES." All of the characters are a little hard to keep apart from one another, which is the main reason I'm only giving this 4 stars: I think a cast of characters this large doesn't work well in a graphic novel unless the art style lends well to telling everyone apart, and that isn't the case here. (They're also mostly obnoxious and fairly unlikable people, which is something I weirdly enjoy in stories, but if you don't, YMMV on the overall storytelling.)

I was really excited to try this horror/scifi graphic novel. I saw the art was amazing and was so excited to get super creeped out. Unfortunately I was let down in almost all areas. Stars Volume 2 collects issues #7-12 of the comic. This was supposed to be a limited 12 issue series but the ending of this leaves so many questions unresolved that I have to assume there will be more issues. Will I read them though? Probably not. This was interesting to read directly after plowing through three volumes of Something is Killing… in a weekend. The two are quite different in tone, while both being horror, and this one is less fun and boisterous but more atmospheric and tense. While the art is fantastic in both, I prefer his art style in Something and this one can sometimes be hard to tell characters apart but also things being fairly obscured is part of the intent. Walter is very similar to the boy in the first arc of Something, and not just that both are drawn fairly similar with their big glasses you never see through but both have an element where in high school they were encouraged to ask their best friend to be their boyfriend, were rejected, and still maintain a friendship that is making them awkward. Comparatively though, this one felt a big of a slog, starting strong and ending strong, but sort of languishing in the middle (though Dave being goofy is pretty charming). Each issue being told in what appears to be a present set decently into the future where they all seem like battle hardened dystopia vets leads me to think this is only going to get epic.And then there was the explanations of all the machinations behind the scenes. To be honest, I actually feel like I would have enjoyed this more if Tynion and company had actually left this part unexplained and let the readers create their own theories as to what was going on. One of the social media posters says his brother was on Twitch when his eyeballs melted. Another mentions that her skin is coming off on her phone screen as she types.

As everyone prepares to leave the house, however, Ryan realizes this is why Walter brought them there. Walter tells them they can't leave — he loves them, so he has made sure to spare them from the genocide his people are doing. They will survive the apocalypse...but they can't leave the house on the lake. Ever. Hidden Depths: As Walter points out, David can be "pretty stupid" a lot of the time, but he is a remarkably perceptive individual who understands people. David is the first to realise that the guests can't remember how they arrived at the Nice House, and that they can't die. He also gives Molly an empathic speech about her suicidal tendencies. Baggy storytelling.. feels like the same story could've been told a lot more tightly. At least two issues/chapters felt like wheelspinning. I liked this more than the first volume actually. It seems to have landed with a thud for most others, but after adjusting to breadcrumb storytelling of long arc comics, it didn’t come as a surprise to me, especially after the first volume, that there would be a twist but not a resolution. I’m still interested in what comes after this major part and think it resolved some things that made it even more incredulous than things asserted beforehand. I’m not entirely sure it can navigate to the future where they’re clearly in a further future, and it’s basically some kind of dystopia hunger games thing, but the journey there, so far, is enticing enough. Human Aliens: Walter talks about what his "people" are going to do to the planet, but he appears entirely human. When Norah tries to kill him with a fire poker, however, she slices through his head, but it appears to completely replace itself within seconds.

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A mutual friend, Walter, invites ten people to stay in a fancy lakeside house in the country for a weekend getaway. A nice house, far enough away from the hectic pace of modern life to make you think you were the last people on Earth - and then it turns out that you are! Because “Walter” is an alien who has saved his nearest and dearest from the end of the world. What next - imprisonment in some hellish mystery box? Oh… Big Fancy House: The book is, after all, called The Nice House on the Lake. It's really nice and includes pretty much everything the characters could want, including a movie theatre. Of course, Walter did this because he knew that they could never leave. all abstractions, all generalizations, treat words and images and people and thoughts as units existing in some matrix of comparison. the doctor, the pianist, the politico, the artist(s), etc. et al, all the participants in this study taking place in a nice house on the lake... all treat the story as substance. all treat their own selves as having some substance, a genuine identity, rather than a label or title to be fulfilled. all attempt to communicate. all fail. their last communication, for now, for when, is a bullet. it fails. but that was the plan all along, to fail. to fail is to keep living? Ryan Cane is a 26-year-old artist living in New York City alongside her circle of friends. One summer, she is invited by a friend named Walter to stay with ten of their other friends at a nice house on the lake. Too many characters. I kept confusing them til the very end. Oh no, something happened to one of the characters, which one was that again, etc. Worst thing is probably that it doesn't matter that much which character is which.