storytimed 's review for:

The Nice House on the Lake Vol. 1 by James Tynion IV

5.0

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Very very nice comic................. Very nice

Ends on a cliffhanger augh

Look at this art...... this use of color

Seven friends go on a vacation together and learn that (this is not really a spoiler because it's the premise) they were actually invited because the host is an alien whose species is destroying humanity and he thinks they deserved to be saved

It's actually quite funny that Walter's job was to find the best people on the planet and save them but unfortunately he decided to rescue his own personal friends instead

Most of the characters are a little slight but I'm such a sucker for minutely detailed analyses of interpersonal dynamics

And I love seeing Walter, this sad, bad, little man, as reflected through all the people he knows

And the flashbacks to how each of them met him & their realtionship to him! You have the high school scene, the college scene, the New York scene

It's almost a survey of one man's social life, through the people he most loves. Each character gets a little symbol with their profession/passion too which is quite fun 
And this has one of my favorite characters in comics, Norah (the writer)!

She's so........... she's a bitter, depressed, chain-smoking trans woman who's Walter's oldest friend

They have this antagonistic/codependent relationship at one point that I'm obsessed with. She hates him. He needs her. She needs him to need her.

At one point she accuses him of resenting that she's trans, not because he's transphobic but because he can't stand that there's a part of her he did not know

Such a complicated dynamic

And at the end of the comic it's revealed that his marvelous plan to get the group to accept their situation was MASTERMINDED BY NORAH FROM THE START!! And she has to live with the fact that she collaborated with the guy who destroyed her world and he just smilingly explains that this was the first time he really truly trusted a human and it was great for him! He wishes he'd trusted more people earlier! I love/hate them so much

Also love that this is a very queer book! Walter's high school friends are all queer (he himself is bisexual) and that's part of what bonds them together at the start

Very fun comic

Walter is Such a softboy lmao like he's always crying on his friends' shoulders about how he's worried they'll hate him when the reason they would hate him is BECAUSE HIS PEOPLE ARE PLANNING TO DESTROY HUMANITY AND HE WILL NOT TRY TO STOP THEM