Let's Talk About NICE HOUSE (and about ME)

The Nice House By The Sea #1 is FOCing July 1st, and James Tynion IV is here to tell you why you should get your orders in RIGHT AWAY

Hello Friends,

James here. It’s been a minute since I’ve gotten the chance to do something a little rambly and directly from myself. Hi! I’ve missed you. I hope you’re having a nice summer so far. New York decided to preview the heat and humidity of August last week just to punish us all for living in a city where we walk everywhere, but that didn’t stop me from walking everywhere. I just got a little more cooked than usual.

I’m very tired. Specifically, I am very tired because I had to set my alarm for 5:30AM to get to the airport in time for the first leg of my flight to San Diego for the ALA Conference this weekend. In a broader sense, I am very tired because there is a tremendous lot going on in both my professional and personal life.

It does turn out that starting a company when you’re writing a very large number of comic books a month is a lot. I suspected it was going to be a lot, and I was correct. It’s even more when you’re doing your best not to give up your social life, or your gym regimen. It’s been a struggle balancing it all out, but I will say things are hitting a nice equilibrium. Having an amazing support staff at Tiny Onion, and great partners in my film/tv work means that now after months of having to get everything in motion, my day-to-day is much more about system maintenance and actually writing. Over the next three to six months there will be some fun announcements in the comics and multimedia spaces that will give a better sense of what I’ve been doing, and what Tiny Onion is planning to do next.

One very nice thing to discover in the face of all of this is how much I really love writing, and creative work in general. I enjoy the business side of things more than I would have ever guessed, but that enjoyment is nothing next to the actual act of BUILDING a project. The problem solving you have to do working on a long-running series when you suddenly have a new big idea that blows up your plans, and the collaborative joy of building a new project from the ground up. I’ve been working on the first issue of my second DSTLRY project, and going back and forth on a key character design, and I woke up to the character now fully formed waiting in my text messages. The joy in the moment the characters finally come to life is absolutely incredible.

I’m doing my best to keep being a person in the face of all of this. I made a promise to myself at the start of last year to let myself be a little messier emotionally, and I’ve certainly lived up to my end of the bargain. That can come with a little heartbreak, and it certainly has, and that’s been a defining feature of the start of the summer. Spotify was rude enough to tell me the other week how many times I’ve listened to “I Can Do It With A Broken Heart” over the last month. I still wouldn’t trade it for the alternative. There’s something to grabbing life by the live wires and letting it shock you a little. I don’t know what i’d have to write about if I wasn’t out there living my life like this. Maybe someday I’ll find out. But the older I get the more comfortable I get with the idea that I am precisely who I am, for better and for worse, and I enjoy the mistakes I keep making. This is apparently very frustrating to my close friends, but I think they secretly enjoy my antics and eagerly await the next chapters of my stories.

Pictured Here: James Enjoying His Own Antics

My trainers are a little angry with me. Last summer I made the mistake of getting drunk in the backyard of a friend and arm-wrestling to the point I pulled a muscle in my right arm and spent three months at 70% of my lifting capacity. A couple of weekends ago I managed to do the same thing to my left arm drunk in the basement of a different friend. I tried to explain to my trainers that arm-wrestling is a great excuse to hold your cute friend’s hand, stare them directly in the eyes, and try to defeat them. They explained to me that I am not allowed to do overhead presses or boxing for the next month, and proceeded to punish me with high intensity high cardio circuit training.

The whole health journey has continued to be extremely interesting and gratifying. I’m past the moment where I am dropping pounds on the scale, having leveled out around 175/180lb down from my peak weight two summers ago — but I am still losing inches around the waist as I build up the muscle. It’s satisfying having muscles! I like them! They’re good at lifting stuff, and look nice in a tight shirt, but they are apparently not good at arm wrestling. I think by next summer I should be able to arm wrestle and defeat all of my cute friends. My trainers have told me I am not allowed to do this, but I think I mentioned that I enjoy the mistakes I keep making.

Anyways that’s a bit of the personal stuff. What of it I’m willing to lay out in such direct terms. The rest of it I’ll chop up into pieces and put into my comics. I do think of my larger body of work as deeply autobiographical, in many ways that I am sure are obvious to you reading it, and other ways that are only obvious to my closest friends (aka the people I chop up and put into my comic books).

And there’s no project where I’m more guilty of doing that than the NICE HOUSE series.

So. Full disclosure. I didn’t start this ramble just to delight you with my arm-wrestling antics (I should mention it was at a theme party and I was dressed up like a frat boy and unfortunately it was a pretty good look for me - The picture’s on IG if you want to see for yourself). I wanted to write this to tell you about the next story cycle of NICE HOUSE, which just so happens to be hitting its Final Order Cut-Off this coming monday. What that means is that if you definitely want a copy of NICE HOUSE BY THE SEA #1 in your hands on the release day (July 24th), you need to tell your Local Comic Shop to pre-order it today.

NHBTS #1 Cover A by Alvaro Martinez Bueno

“BUT JAMES!” you cry out from the other side of the screen. “I DON’T UNDERSTAND! WHERE IS MY BELOVED WALTER AND ALL OF HIS FRIENDS IN THEIR NICE LAKE HOUSE?! WHAT IS GOING ON??!”

Well, dear reader, let me tell you.

Back at the end of THE NICE HOUSE ON THE LAKE -- just before Walter’s friends decide to kill him -- Walter reveals to Ryan that the Lake House was only one of multiple sample sets of humanity taken to preserve the human race after Walter’s species destroyed the world. The “Walters” out there were tasked with selecting ten exceptional humans in ten pre-determined categories. Walter, being everybody’s favorite sad-boy flesh tornado, fell in love with ten of his closest friends and decided to save them instead of following the rules.

NHBTS #1 Cover by Dani

Ever since setting out the central premise, the idea of exploring one of the cells where the Walter-figure actually followed the rules has been deeply interesting to me. Rather than Walter bending the rules to fit what he wanted, our new collector character, MAX, followed the rules to the letter. Her ten picks were gathered over years and recruited deliberately – Ten of the most exceptional humans in each of their respective fields. In MAX’s house, there was never any subterfuge… Her picks knew the end of the world was coming and agreed to live forever in this strange paradise. This also means that from day one, they’ve known the full science fiction potentials of this controlled afterlife, amd how to use them. The entire way they interact with their bodies and the landscape as something fully customizable to their desires - all to a very unsettling effect.

NHBTS #1 Cover by Nick Robles

THE NICE HOUSE BY THE SEA starts with an actor named Oliver Landon Clay (who you can see in the incredible covers above by Alvaro Martinez Bueno and Nick Robles). Oliver is a very key character in the whole larger Nice House mythos in ways that will become much clearer to you once you read the issue. I wrote Alvaro a little letter about Oliver and the new cast in my preamble to Issue #1, and I thought I’d share it with you here.

Here’s the important thing about Oliver.

In a lot of ways he is the anti-Walter even more than Max is. I think there should be something about his eyes that counters Walter. He should have a real intensity to his eyes. He’s usually a little aloof and detached, but when he’s interested he zeroes in. He’s surprised by being interested, he ENJOYS being interested. He smiles, and he goes from detached to engaged. There’s something always a little seductive about him.

If Walter is kind of a sad dog, Oliver is a cat. He slinks. He’s self-absorbed and self-determined. He likes attention, though he’s not particularly affectionate. He likes to be kissed more than he likes to kiss. He likes to be pursued more than he pursues. He plays with his “food” in a kind of detached half-interested way.

When we meet him in the NHBTS he is bored. He is bored with his life. He is bored with the same boring people. He is craving something to happen.

I think that’s one of the most important thing we’ll want to address with the whole new cast. The NHOTL cast are friends. They have history together. They love and care about each other even when they irritate each other. The people in this house DO NOT LIKE each other. They don’t want to spend time with each other. There have been some weak bonds that have formed over time, but none of them are particularly affectionate to each other. This is a house of strangers and tension much more than a house of friendship. So much of what they are doing and how they are expressing themselves is about boredom.

The unspoken horror is that, unlike our other house, everyone in this house accepted the deaths of all of their friends, families, and loved ones. The eradication of the human race, and their selection as the last humans that will ever exist. It’s a truth that some of them think they can live with but the way that they are living with it is never, ever looking at it.

The whole issue is about stasis, guilt, boredom… And then the storm rips it all wide open.

The rest of the cast is compelling and horrible in so many ways. I am particularly excited for you to meet the character I’ll call out as something of the villain of this cycle. The artificially de-aged Victor Pace, an acclaimed bestselling pop-fiction writer of paperback thrillers, and one of the most unpleasant people I’ve ever had the pleasure of writing.

So… That’s where we start… But what does that mean for our old friends at the Lake House? And what about Walter himself? I can’t speak to that just yet. But I will say that this is the second story cycle of one big story, and let me just say that I’m not going to take the book that’s the most personal story I’ve ever worked on, and throw out all the things that make it so personal to me.

But that’s about all you’re going to get out of me until you read the first couple issues of the new series.

As always, this project also operates as an excuse to show off the absolutely stellar, award-winning artwork by some of my favorite humans — my co-creator Alvaro Martinez Bueno, and all-star colorist Jordie Bellaire, and stunning design and lettering from the fine people at AndWorld Design. None of this would be possible without DC Editor Extraordinaire, Chris Conroy, who put me and Alvaro together for the first time about a decade ago, and has helped keep us together ever since. The book is just gorgeous. Just wait until you see the big alien blob we’ve got in the back half of the first issue. And if you want to see a bit more, we have a BEEFY preview of our oversized first issue up over at Gizmodo.

Go check it out…

NHBTS #1 Cover by Hayden Sherman

Anyways. That’s enough from me. I’ll be getting in to San Diego a bit later today, and I’ll be spending the day on airplanes and in airport lounges reading my Agatha Christie novels (next up are the first Poirot and Marple books respectively), watching movies I’ve seen a hundred times before, and trying to get a little writing done along the way. Please do reach out your local comic shop and tell them you want to order this book.

Love you all. Thank you for reading. I hope you enjoy the rest of your summer, and I hope I see some of you at ALA, and a few more of you next month at SDCC. Nice House comes out the Wednesday of the show, so you should snag a copy and come get it signed by me.

James Tynion IV
The Sky Over America
6.28.24