Variant Covers – The Nice House on The Lake #1
Variant Covers – The Nice House on The Lake #1
Read our BGCP review of issue #1 here.
It all begins with the nice house on the lake.
Get ready to visit The Nice House on the Lake — but be prepared to be terrified. An invite from Walter to his Mom’s friends’ lakehouse will set the scene for his beautiful monsters to meet grisly fates!
All hail James Tynion! From Batman, introducing new character Punchline to the hot The Department of Truth, and the chilling Something is Killing the Children he’s found his comic groove! On top of that, he launched his own title, Razorblades — it’s safe to say that 2020 and 2021 will be defined by something he touched.
Now, he is tackling one of his most personal stories, using the horror lens, with the creator-owned comic, The Nice House on the Lake, drawn by Álvaro Martínez Bueno. And in a rare move, DC, which mostly left behind creator-owned publishing years ago when it shuttered its Vertigo imprint, is releasing the comic beginning in June, via its more mature Black Label line.
The story sees a group of mostly 30-somethings invited to a sylvan lake house by a friend named Walter. Some have known him since childhood, some from college, some from a party a few months ago. He’s a little odd, but after a year that everyone has had – while not mentioning the pandemic, the comic feels very current with its temperature checks and social media connectivity — people are ready for an escape. Once there however, the group learns the world has fallen into terrifying chaos and that they may never be able to leave. Oh, and Walter is so not who they thought he was.
Tynion told The Hollywood Reporter:
Sometimes it helps to look at yourself from the least flattering angle, especially when you are dealing with horror. Horror is a genre that is all about talking about societal fears and personal fears. And this is me taking apart those fears in this book.
James Tynion – The Hollywood Reporter
Comic Watch has now dropped a tonne of variant covers as well as the first eight pages for all you comic collectors to kick the doors down of your local comic shop and demand it added to your June Subscription. Most of these variants will not be available in the good old UK but I’ve added some of the more well-known specialist sellers that will probably be getting them in (with the option of 9.8 CGC and signed probably!)
Background
Horror does seem to be one place where DC has crept into creator-owned works. A recent foray was a quartet of titles from Hill House Comics, an imprint created and overseen by author Joe Hill, which it published in 2019 and into 2020.
Tynion says one of his earliest creator-owned horrors comics, Boom!’s The Woods, about students and faculty of a prep school transported to a far-off moon, was his attempt to filter his teenage experience via the lens of being in his twenties. Nice House, he says, is him looking back at his 20s while now a 33-year-old.
“There is a moment in all of our lives, I think, when we start to move away from interconnected friend groups and evolving into more individual states. You still have friends and you still see your friends, but they are not such a huge part of your life as they are in your 20s. There is a loss when you enter your 30s there that you know you will never get back even though you long for it.”
That dichotomy of “wanting to back and recreating the perfect moment in your life but needing to grow up and make your own way, that tension is the heart of the book.”
The core idea for the story came about five years ago but it really started coalescing in the last few. The pandemic has made the themes of isolation and outside horror only more relevant and universal.
“We greenlit this story before the entire world slipped into a global pandemic that put everyone on Earth into isolation and replicated that feeling of alienation worldwide,” says Conroy, “and now we have the visceral, haunting horror story that will hopefully help everyone process what we’ve all just gone through.”
The book is a 12-issue limited series and DC is calling it “a season.” More seasons could be produced if the comic is a success.
Let’s get to the Good Stuff!!
The Nice House on the Lake launches on June 1 with a cover by Álvaro Martínez Bueno, an open-to-order card stock variant cover by Martin Simmonds, and a 1:25 card stock variant cover by Werther Dell’Edera & Giovanna Niro. The colours are by Jordie Bellaire and the lettering is by AndWorld Design. The Nice House on the Lake carries an Ages 17+ content descriptor (for mature readers.). Card stock variant covers retail for a slightly higher US cover price of $4.99. For the more serious cover collectors out there..
Exclusive covers from these participating US retailers are also available (but shipping will hurt your pocket!):
Comic Kingdom of Canada – exclusive variant cover by Carla Cohen
State of Comics — exclusive variant cover by Richard Luong
Things From Another World — exclusive variant cover by Francesco Francavilla
The 616 Comics — exclusive variant cover by Megan Hutchison-Cates
Comic Madness — exclusive variant cover by David Romero
Comics Elite — exclusive variant cover by John Giang
Frankies Comics — exclusive variant cover by Ken Lashley and Chris Sotomayor
Sanctum Sanctorum Comics — exclusive variant cover by Robert Hack
Third Eye Comics and Tiny Onion Studios — exclusive variant cover by Álvaro Martínez Bueno
Wanted Comics — exclusive variant cover by John Gallagher
UK specialist retailers:
From experience if you don’t want to shell out ten times the cover price for one of these juicy variants you’ll need to contact some of the best UK specialist sellers (but you should ask your local comic retailer first!):
Warning! Buying variant covers is a risky business, today’s £300 comic can become tomorrow’s 50p bargain bin comic, only buy what you can afford and expect that not all of them will last the short term demand market that drives some variants through the three-figure amount!
Read our BGCP review of issue #1 here.
VARIANT COVERS – THE NICE HOUSE ON THE LAKE #1
Are you looking forward to any of the variant covers for THE NICE HOUSE ON THE LAKE #1?
Buy tickets for BGCP Comic Con in and around Glasgow Scotland – BUY TICKETS
Check out all of our Comic, Movie, Television and Videogame Reviews HERE and our Podcasts/Interviews HERE
If you want to be part of the BGCP community, Join us on Discord, Twitter, Instagram etc then click HERE
