The horror comic “The Nice House on the Lake” returns this summer with a new storyline

It has been almost a year and a half since DC Comics released the breathtaking finale of James Tynion IV and Alvaro Martinez Buenos’ The beautiful house by the lake.

The 12-issue limited series, which won an Eisner Award, follows a group of 11 people who are invited by their mutual friend Walter to an idyllic house in rural Wisconsin for a long weekend. But only after they arrive do they learn the terrible truth: Walter is an alien, the rest of humanity has been wiped out, and none of the house guests are allowed to leave the house.

This July, Tynion and Bueno return with The beautiful house by the seaa limited sequel to The beautiful house by the lake

this time with a focus on another Group of guests at another luxurious house — this one modeled on an exotic Mediterranean villa — compiled by another Shapeshifting alien named Max. There are a few key differences, however: Unlike Walter’s group, the guests are not particularly good friends with each other, and each of them voluntarily chose to survive in paradise while the rest of humanity burned in the alien fire.

The beautiful house by the lake was and remains one of the most exciting crime series of the last two years. Lawrence Kasdan’s The great coldabout Michael Schurs The good placemeets Stephen King’s Itthe series was an impeccably well-paced apocalyptic drama. Tynion and Bueno delved deep into the dark secrets of their cast, cleverly hinting at the story’s ultimate conclusion; a stunning and ominous cliffhanger that opened the door for even more thrilling secrets and revelations.

Polygon got a glimpse of the first issue of The beautiful house by the sea ahead of its release next month, and it strikes a surprising balance between mirroring the narrative and visual structure of the original series and twisting the apocalyptic thought experiment of an original premise into ever more horrific forms. When The beautiful house by the lakeIt was a story about love and how it can turn into something terrible, The beautiful house by the sea establishes itself as a story about how the absence of love turns us all into monsters.

The amount of craftsmanship and care that goes into the artistic design and writing of The beautiful house by the sea

fortunately in no way reflects the absence that plagues the main characters. Bueno’s artistic work is remarkable as always, contrasting the wooded rural splendor of the original series’ setting with a picturesque biome of stunning vistas and ornate architecture.

Since this group of house guests are voluntary participants in Max’s alien experiment and thus also accomplices in the extinction of human civilization itself, Tynion can play with the alien technologies that he and Bueno originally developed in The beautiful house by the lakebut which remained largely hidden from Walter’s unsuspecting guests until late in the story. From making joint decisions about the weather of the day to arbitrarily changing your appearance and body – how far would you go before you no longer recognized yourself as a human being?

How the series will answer this question and how the participants of Max’s experiment will learn and react to the consequences of the experiment, The beautiful house by the lakewe have to wait until the first issue of The beautiful house by the sea will be released on July 27th.