The Nice House by the Sea is a dream vacation at the end of the world with the worst people you know

It’s been almost a year and a half since DC Comics published the breathtaking finale of James Tynion IV and Alvaro Martinez Bueno’s The beautiful house on the lake.

The 12-issue, Eisner-winning limited series followed a group of 11 people who are invited by their mutual friend Walter for a long weekend vacation at an idyllic home in rural Wisconsin. But only after arriving do they discover the terrible truth: Walter is an alien, the rest of the human race has been wiped out and none of the house guests are allowed to leave.

Tynion and Bueno return in July with The Beautiful House by the Seaa limited series sequel The beautiful house on the lakethis time centrally another group of guests another luxurious home – this is inspired by an exotic Mediterranean villa – curated by another shape-shifting alien named Max. However, there are a few crucial differences: unlike Walter’s group, none of the guests are particularly friends with each other, and each of them has voluntarily chosen to survive in paradise while the rest of humanity burns in alien fire .

The beautiful house on the lake was and remains one of the most compelling serialized mysteries of the past two years. Lawrence Kasdan The big coldvia Michael Schur’s The right placemeets Stephen King’s It, the series was an impeccably well-paced, apocalyptic drama. Tynion and Bueno delved deep into the dark secrets of their cast, neatly foreshadowing the story’s ultimate conclusion along the way; a breathtaking and ominous cliffhanger that opened the door for even more charged mysteries and revelations.

Polygon got a look at the first issue of The Beautiful House by the Sea ahead of publication 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 increasingly gruesome forms. If The Nice House on the LakIt was a story about love and the ways it can be twisted into something terrible. The Beautiful House by the Sea presents itself as a story about how the absence of love makes us all monsters.

Image: James Tynion IV, Álvaro Martínez Bueno/DC Comics

The amount of craftsmanship and care put into the artwork and writing The Beautiful House by the SeaFortunately, it doesn’t reflect the absence of the main characters in any way. Bueno’s artwork is remarkable as always, contrasting the wooded, pastoral splendor of the original series with a picturesque biome of breathtaking vistas and ostentatious architecture.

Because this group of houseguests are willing participants in Max’s alien experiment, and by extension complicit in the eradication of human civilization itself, Tynion is able to play with the alien technologies he and Bueno initially introduced in The beautiful house on the lake, but they remained largely hidden from Walter’s unsuspecting guests until late in the story. From collectively determining the day’s weather to reshaping your appearance and physique at will, how far would you go before you could no longer recognize yourself as a human being?

As for how the series will answer this question, and how the participants in Max’s experiment will learn and respond to the aftermath of The beautiful house on the lakewe’ll have to wait until the first issue of The Beautiful House by the Sea will be released on July 27.