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James Tynion IV has created some stand-out horror villains over the course of his comics career. There's the Star-Faced Man in The Department of Truth, The Fox Mask Killer in Exquisite Corpses. But one that stands out even among those creepy critters is the enigmatic Walter from Tynion's DC Vertigo series, The Nice House on the Lake. And that might just be because, out of all his villains, Walter is the most like Tynion himself.

The storied Batman scribe revealed as much during an interview with Popverse's own Editor-in-Chief Chris Arrant at C2E2 2026. At one point in the discussion, Chris asked Tynion if his writing was ever a way to process the real-life struggles he goes through, and the Wynd author got into specifics about what parts of himself go onto the page.

"The Nice house on the Lake is a very personal horror story for me," Tynion explained, "And the villain of that story is very much based on me. The character of Walter. If you look at Walter in the comic, it's like, you know, he looks a lot like me. That's on purpose."

In case you haven't read the DC Vertigo-published Nice House on the Lake or its sequel, The Nice House by the Sea, you might not know that Walter is... er, not exactly a human being. Without spoiling too much, I'll say that Walter is, among all the terrible things that can describe him, a kind of jailkeeper - a frighteningly powerful being who keeps a select group of normal people trapped in the titular House while an apocalypse goes on outside. And as Tynion says here, he has an eerie resemblance to his creator.

"I created a series where I was able to dig into the parts of myself that made me the most uncomfortable," the Eisner-winner continued, "And really analyze them and attack them. Writing is always a kind of therapy and, in horror, you can be ugly. You can lean into the ugliest parts of society, the ugliest parts of yourself, and that's really valuable [...] Readers really connect to material that has that strong personal edge and that strong  know personal drive."

The Nice House on the Lake is available wherever you get your comics. You can watch Popverse's full interview with James Tynion IV below:

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