Comic Review: Nice House on the Lake #4

Nice House on The Lake #4

DC Comics

Writer: James Tynion IV

Artist: Alvaro Martinez Bueno

Nice House on the Lake is shaping up to be the best writing from James Tynion I’ve encountered to date. It’s been a huge surprise for me, and in no small part due to Alvaro Martinez Bueno’s outstanding artwork. With Nice House on The Lake #4, Tynion and Martinez deliver the best issue since the series’ debut.

The strength of this book is its tight focus and compelling concept. It’s just twelve people trapped in small area unable to leave, while being given every material thing they could want to keep them happy. However, they’re burdened with the knowledge that they’re the last living people on the planet. The idea of living on this beautiful property for the rest of my life with everything I want delivered to me with a wave of my hand sounds like a dream, and yet it’s so hard to imagine how I’d feel about it knowing what these characters know. Watching each character work through this and try to make the best of the situation has been endlessly fascinating and is a strong enough idea to carry the entire book.

This issue focuses primarily on a single character (one who’s name I don’t know despite reading the issue twice, but I’ll get to that) and his struggle to reconcile with his new reality. This character takes on the goofball roll, but quickly proves himself to be smarter than he lets on. He sort of connects himself to everyone else, acting as the mailman of sorts, as a means of gathering information to help them better understand what they’re dealing with. His arc in this issue makes for the most entertaining chapter of the series yet.

Where I’d say the book falters a bit is in it’s ability to juggle all of these characters. It tends to just focus on a few per issue, but with the wait time in between issues I always feel that I’m starting back at square one every time. I’ve really grown attached to this character this month, but every other character in the issue was completely unfamiliar to me. I understand it’s tough to build that many characters with so few pages, but since that is the entire point of the book I would like more time to get to know them all. I’m sure it will read fantastically in trade, but it is being released in the monthly format so it needs to accommodate those readers, too.

Alvaro Martinez Bueno consistently crushes this book. His work is so stunning and so different from what he’s done before, and it’s the best part of the series. It’s much more rough and stylish now than in his DC work, and it works. Every character is visually distinct despite just wearing pretty normal clothing, and it manages to be visually interesting despite being so dialogue heavy. There’s very little action in this book, but still never appears dull.

Nice House on the Lake #4 is the best issue so far. The art is masterful, and the writing is paced perfectly. With a big reveal and plenty of room for more, we’re left with a satisfying issue that leaves you begging for the next.