By Zack Quaintance — The Nice House on the Lake #1 — a new horror comic out this week via DC Comics Black Label imprint — made me mad — mad that a comic this perfect exists. Mostly, it made me mad because this year I’ve worked hard to be stingy with perfect 10 review scores, and I’d done a good job of it, holding out on giving the first one all the way until last week (for The Blue Flame #1, which was incredible). But then The Nice House on the Lake #1 comes along.

Now, my hand is forced — this comic is so good that I have to give my second perfect 10 score of the year, just one week after having given out the first. That silly anger aside, I absolutely loved every last thing about this comic. So much so, that it’s almost hard to pick a single place to start singing its praises. The book looks amazing, even the info pages are captivating, the character introductions are stylish as all get out, and the coherence between the individual elements is perfect.

A lot of what The Nice House on the Lake #1 does is take some newer elements and exposition dump conventions that have been in vogue within mainstream comics of late, and do them better than we’ve ever seen them. I’m thinking specifically here of the info pages and of the character introductions, which are small things but vital in ensuring that the reading experience of this book is fully immersive, that this story grabs the reader from start to finish. Info pages have been gaining momentum in comics, and we should maybe trace their emergence of late back to Keith Giffen’s work with them in the sci-fi heavy comics he illustrated in the ‘80s. There’s not a straight line — good luck finding many (or maybe even any) in the late ‘90s or early ‘00s — but they’ve returned with a vengeance in mad genius sci-fi conceptualist Jonathan Hickman’s work, most prominently in the recent Marvel Comics Dawn of X relaunch, designed to a shiny perfect by Tom Mueller across the line.

While those X-Men comics have used infographics consistently for a couple years now, the majority of the pages in those books (of which there are many) feel superfluous and skippable, like the remnants of a stylistic commitment that worked really well at the start and needs to be upheld to assure coherence. Every last info page in The Nice House on the Lake #1 is absolutely perfect, and I found myself excited when I turned onto them, be they a snippet from an email or a two-page Twitter feed spread that reveals the emerging horrific plight of the world. The visual detail is great, and the writing uses the contents of the page in a way that is not only additive, but makes sense within the plot. We get the Twitter spread not because the creators need to dump info on us. No, we get it because the characters are checking Twitter. You can see example of one of these pages below.

The character intros are handled similarly. Giving quick character names, labels, and summaries on the page has been a trend in Big 2 comics for a while now as books have increasingly been made for trade and creators need less obtrusive ways of reminding readers who is who, no longer relying on in-story re-introductions each month. This book’s plot incorporates characters based on quick hit summaries of their lives, and so it creates a natural intro point for the story, as well. Again, you could read through this book and not notice any of this, but it’s all part of a larger whole here that feels entirely immersive.

And let’s talk about that larger whole. Surely, this is not going to end up being one of the best comics of 2021 just because it used info pages and character intros better than anyone has before. No, it’s going to be one of the best books of the year because it’s overall concept is also a trendy comics idea that it does better than anyone else. This is a horror book, of course, but more than that it’s about the end of the world. It’s about putting stylish people (who, let’s face it, we all fancy ourselves, even if secretly) in opulent surroundings (the titular nice house, culled right from an influencers lavish Instagram), and making them face down something we’ve all been dealing with of late — the total collapse of the America and society.

What could be scarier and more of interest in 2021 than feeling comfortable amid a burgeoning apocalypse, surrounded by artsy and interesting and smart friends who are all experiencing it as well? I can’t think of much. A lot of books this year have posited the end of the country as we know it (the list is seriously huge and growing), but none have made it as familiar or relatable as The Nice House on the Lake #1, an absolutely must-read comic.

Overall: The Nice House on the Lake #1 does everything well, from the substance of its info pages to the stylishness of its character to the relatability within its wild premise. When all the small things are done so well, what emerges is the best comic of the year so far. 10/10

REVIEW: The Nice House on the Lake #1

The Nice House on the Lake #1
Writer: James Tynion IV
Artist: Alvaro Martinez Bueno
Colorist: Jordie Bellaire
Letterer: Andworld Design
Publisher: DC Comics - Black Label
Everyone who was invited to the house knows Walter-well, they know him a little, anyway. Some met him in childhood; some met him months ago. And Walter’s always been a little…off. But after the hardest year of their lives, nobody was going to turn down Walter’s invitation to an astonishingly beautiful house in the woods, overlooking an enormous sylvan lake. It’s beautiful, it’s opulent, it’s private-so a week of putting up with Walter’s weird little schemes and nicknames in exchange for the vacation of a lifetime? Why not? All of them were at that moment in their lives when they could feel themselves pulling away from their other friends; wouldn’t a chance to reconnect be…nice?
With Something Is Killing The Children and The Department of Truth, James Tynion IV has changed the face of horror in modern comics - now get ready for his most ambitious story yet, alongside his Detective Comics partner Álvaro Martínez Bueno!
Price: $3.99
Buy It Here: The Nice House on the Lake #1

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Zack Quaintance is a tech reporter by day and freelance writer by night/weekend. He Tweets compulsively about storytelling and comics as Comics Bookcase.