WARNING: The following contains major spoilers for The Nice House on the Lake #1 by James Tynion IV, Alvaro Martinez Bueno, Jordie Bellaire, and Andworld Design, on sale now.
Horror comics have been a cornerstone of DC's publishing line for decades, and the newest DC Black Label title, The Nice House on the Lake just introduced readers to one of the most gruesome apocalypses imaginable. With its tale of alien invasion and devastation, this take on the end of the world is as haunting as anything every published under DC's seminal Vertigo imprint.
The comic follows Ryan Cane, one of 12 invitees to a mildly mysterious gathering at an impossibly perfect home situated right on an equally picturesque lake in the woods. While there, she reconnects with old friends and acquaintances who also received invitations to spend a week at the house. As it turns out, the evening's festivities were hosted by everyone's mutual friend Walter, but they're less of a celebration and more of an escape.
As everyone drinks and lounges at the pool, Ryan steps away to check her phone and discovers that the rest of the world is quite literally burning away while the rest of them have been somehow blissfully unaware. Social media is filled with images of people, buildings, and seemingly the sky itself ablaze, as civilization seemingly bruns to its end everywhere on Earth, except the lake house.
As it turns out, Walter is not of this world, and his people have attacked the rest of the world. He doesn't explain himself any further than that, saying that the specifics of who he is or what has happened to the world are both irrelevant, but that the 12 people he has gathered are all safe to live out their lives without want for anything as long as they never leave. When he is attacked, Walter's face splits in half before warping and tearing open his assailant's hand only to continue his menacing monologue as if nothing happened.
While the horrors of this still-mysterious apocalypse play out primarily through Twitter postings and horrific screenshots, it carries on the tradition of novel ends of the world that Vertigo thrived at.
In 2002, Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra's masterpiece, Y: The Last Man introduced a world where all living mammals with a Y chromosome suddenly and simultaneously die in a single day. This leads to not only the deaths of every man on the planet, but countless other tragic losses in the process, and the future of humanity lies in the hands of Yorick Brown and his pet monkey, though not everyone is happy about it. Y: The Last Man is still far from comparable in its brutality to what is happening in the pages of The Nice House on the Lake, but few stories are. Even in the universe of Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson's Transmetropolitan, where entire cities are left to fend for themselves from inescapable storms, the orchestrated and calculated destruction is far from on par.
Even outside of what DC has published in the past there are few if any apocalyptic comics that can stand up to the terrors unveiled by The Nice House on the Lake. 2001's Just a Pilgrim from Garth Ennis and Carlos Ezquerra could be the closest with its Earth that spontaneously combusts long enough to eliminate nearly all life on the planet, which somehow still has a massive number of survivors compared to the twelve of DC's latest horror story.
And now, the few survivors of The Nice House on the Lake must face the horrifying prospect of the end of the world, an alien invasion and a deeply personal betrayal, even if it comes with a view that can't be beat.