It’s you, 10 or so people you kinda know and the nicest house on the prettiest lake you’ve ever been to. But you can’t leave. And Anderson Cooper just burned to death on live television. Have a restful weekend at The Nice House on the Lake #1, written by James Tynion IV, drawn by Álvaro Martinez Bueno, colored by Jordie Bellaire, lettered by AndWorld Design and published by DC’s Black Label.
Will: Forrest, if a mysterious man who always wanted to talk about the end of the world invited you to a posh lake house for a summer weekend and gave you a codename, what would that codename be?
Forrest: Will, I’m going to be honest and say that my immediate reaction was “The Big Show,” but because I don’t want us to get sued, I’m going to go with The Advisor. It’s my real line of work and sounds cool.
Will: I like it. Suits you. *And* most of the ones in the book were career-based. I think mine would be The Professor. It’s always been my create-a-wrestler video game gimmick anyway. Not sure if that would endear me to the other housemates, though.
The Advisor: I’m just realizing we’re both queer academics writing academically about queer comics and that’s both very neat and almost beyond parody. We would never both get selected for this definitely cool and not scary vacay.
The Professor: We might be staring at the gates of the compound as our skin boils and the air is on fire, but Happy Pride anyway! On to the business at hand: This comic? This comic right here? This thing fucks. Even with the social media buzz and all the love it has gotten in the ComicsXF office, I had no idea it would fuck this hard. I mean, there was one page that left me a little nauseous — in a good way! What were your expectations coming into this, and were they as blown away as mine?
The Advisor: You know, we’ve been doing that good good work on Tynion’s good good Department of Truth for a bit now, so I expected something for sure, but I don’t think I expected this. It’s so succinct and yet expansive — and published by DC no less!
The Professor: And before we get into the meat of it, what’s your back cover blurb since I don’t think DC is going to go with “This comic fucks”?
The Advisor: This comic screws! OK, sorry, probably not that. Maybe something like “Cosmic horror with compelling conventional conviction”?
The Professor: This is Black Label, friend. We don’t have to say “screws.” But good fucking job with the alliteration there.
Watch as Everything Burns
The Professor: (Slight) Hyperbole aside, this first issue takes a little time to get going; we get a flash-forward opening to what looks like a post-apocalyptic world before settling down into a relatively normal scene with our lead Ryan chatting up a fellow (Walter) at a party. From there, we meet the cast of characters: The Writer, The Comedian, The Acupuncturist, etc. I’ll admit — I was a little puzzled with all of the hype given this slow build, but then I got to that turn. That goddamned turn that set my brain on fire. Advisor, I loved reading each one of those faux tweets, and while I’ll save my favorite for our odds ’n’ ends section, what was yours?
The Advisor: Ryan’s last name is Cane, all of the emails and accounts are addressed to “RCaneArtistry.” Happy Pride to Mykie Mychaels!
The Professor: I’ll get to a larger point in a moment, but I wanted to say here that I loved these epistolary/in-world/diegetic touches with the tweets and emails. Whenever you can get prose into your comic and it’s not a Bendis-esque dialogue chain or giant word balloon pregnant with a paragraph, I’m probably going to be a big fan, and this worked as much as I’ve seen anything work — and I really hope it keeps up as we get into the series.
The Advisor: I think that’s due to the grounded nature of it. “Googlezon Marketplace” is a clear riff, it’s not forcing some necessary-for-the-worldbuilding megacorp into the story, it’s just indicative of what a millenial’s (all of the characters here, save Walter I guess, fit into that demographic) inbox actually looks like. As it is with the pacing throughout the book, the restraint is admirable.
The Professor: So, that bigger point: After the turn, I was stunned by the extent that the colors change — it was a distinct break between what came before and what came after. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a color palette shift so dramatically and so perfectly in service of the story. As much as we might rave about Tynion (and we’ll get to that here in a second), this series is the complete package.
The Advisor: That’s the combined efforts of colorist Jordie Bellaire (whose work I’ve always adored) and artist and series co-creator Alvaro Martinez Bueno, and the end result is goddamn undeniable.
The home goes from feeling like this expansive, contemporary masterpiece to a claustrophobic cage, doesn’t it? The bright greens, whites and sunkissed yellows turn into muted, demanding blacks and blues — the touches of cosmic purple and pink in Walter’s face as the rest of the cast is reduced to rudimentary monotone. That moment of Ryan tearing away from the phone, that image of a burning person seared into her mind punctuating the gutter is haunting. It’s all so visually dynamic, the attention to detail and to mood.
The Professor: It’s that big ol’ double-truck spread with all those panels that seem to get progressively smaller, with Ryan finally speaking just as it’s time to turn the page. A masterful moment of art, layout and storytelling all coming together.
Something in the Sky Behind the Fire
The Professor: So Tynion’s been doing this comic book writing thing for a while now, hasn’t he? I can take or leave his Batman (usually leave, if I’m being honest), and his Memetic trilogy is good (Eugenic especially — such a tragedy). We certainly talk about Department of Truth as one of the hottest things going. But this? This feels like an escalation. A leveling up.
The Advisor: It’s, if you can believe it, more demanding and daring than Department, I think. Here you have to introduce 11 characters, a sensible setting, stakes, a narrative turn, a compelling cliffhanger, and there’s the in medias res apocalypse opener. Any one of those things can carry a first issue, but to do them all well (especially with sensible attention to introducing the trans character, Norah) is relatively unheard of, most indie comics today opting to space each of those elements out across a usually still compelling but uneven first arc.
The in medias res element might tip you off to a surprise, sure, but it also gives you such a clear insight into Ryan’s voice and experience, a dramatic difference from the otherwise conventional setup, and resisting the urge to return to it by the end of the issue (unsure if the whole thing might take place there next issue) is, again, a level of narrative restraint that I really respect and that I think serves the cosmic-horror driven tension well.
There is No America Left
The Professor: Let’s go back to expectations, specifically 1) Where do you see this series going, and 2) How the hell are we going to manage what we expect from this book? I’m almost worried that this thing is set up to (relatively) fail after this first issue.
The Advisor: It’s hard to say for sure, this is already well beyond the bounds of what I expect from a lot of Big Two books (save for some of the experimentation in Joe Hill’s Hill House Comics recently) that I feel a little unmoored.
I hope we’re not going toward some sort of “race to undo the end of the world” plot, nor do I think it’s a “rebuild Earth” kind of situation, both because that’s passe and because Walter seems very focused on their jobs, and I don’t know how much value a realtor has in the post-apocalypse economy. But I would be quite happy with anything outside of that — the idea of a small, familiar but strange group of people trapped in paradise at the end of the world is really rich.
And don’t forget, Walter hints at “his people” having to do this, and that in and of itself is a chilling, compelling kind of cliffhanger.
The Professor: How do the housemates react? What’s the endgame of Walter’s people? So much to explore. So long to wait for #2.
What to Do When Your Skin Is Coming Off in Pieces
- The mask and temperature check before entering the house is keen environmental storytelling.
- Out of the books The Professor has read, this is the first pandemic-era comic specifically referencing the pandemic without being about the pandemic.
- A Cole Turner/Department of Truth reference? Fuck yeah, a Cole Turner/Department of Truth reference.
- The cast’s focus is on New York City, but several of the tweets indicate “the event” is happening worldwide.
- Walter’s domain? Chariot.org. That’s not creepy at all.
- “Googlezon” was first a creation by the team behind EPIC 2014, a short film that imagined a media hellscape dominated by social media misinformation, legacy institutions unable to compete and tech giants too rich to care. That shit could never happen.
- There’s special attention drawn to the weird sigil statue outside the home, it appears to be one whole appendage reaching out to an incomplete one.
- The cover features 10 symbols, each tied to one of the main cast. Because this story follows Ryan (The Artist’s) perspective, her’s is highlighted. Hopefully this is purely indicative of a shifting narrative and not of this being prematurely limited to a miniseries.
- Recommended listening: Nine Inch Nails’ Ghosts VI: Locusts
Will Nevin loves bourbon and AP style and gets paid to teach one of those things. He is on Twitter far too often.
Forrest is an experimental AI that writes and podcasts about comic books and wrestling coming to your area soon.
