Preview - 'The Dollhouse Family' #1

The upcoming launch of the Hill House imprint from DC Comics has picked up a lot of buzz for the arrival of horror maestro Joe Hill at the publisher, with two original stories from his pen—Basketful of Heads and Plunge—coming in the near future. For me, though, the project I’m most excited about from the line is The Dollhouse Family from Mike Carey and Peter Gross.

Carey and Gross are the maestros behind two of the best comics in the 2000s. Their extended Vertigo masterpiece, The Unwritten, was a meta take on the Harry Potter mythology fused with a fascinating look at the nature of stories, and may be the imprint’s greatest modern masterpiece. They reunited in 2017 for a new original fantasy series, The Highest House, that told the story of a sickly boy who became a castle slave and learned of his powerful potential from an ancient evil.

The Dollhouse Family combines the creative team’s dense plotting and gorgeous artwork with a dark and twisted story of an abused girl who finds comfort in an enchanted dollhouse—but the beings within have their own dark secrets, and some want her to stay forever.

The Dollhouse Family #1 is released from DC Comics on November 13th, 2019. The first seven pages and covers, along with DC Comics’ official press release, can be found below.

—

Playtime Never Ends.

Hill House Comics welcomes its deeply disturbing second series, The Dollhouse Family! On Alice’s sixth birthday, her dying great-aunt sent her the birthday gift she didn’t know she always wanted: a big, beautiful 19th-century dollhouse, complete with a family of antique dolls. In no time at all, the dollhouse isn’t just Alice’s favorite toy… it’s her whole world. And soon, young Alice learns she can enter the house to visit a new group of friends, straight out of a heartwarming children’s novel: the Dollhouse family. But while the Dollhouse family welcome her with open arms, in the real world, her family life is becoming much more complicated… and deep within the Dollhouse’s twisting halls, the black room waits, with an offer to Alice. The house can fix all this, the black room says. All she has to do is say the words…

Longtime collaborators Mike Carey and Peter Gross (Lucifer, The Unwritten) are joined by Vince Locke (The Sandman), to bring their most horrifying vision yet to the Joe Hill-curated Hill House Comics pop-up—a story that echoes into centuries past, into Alice’s tormented future, and into the beating heart of the madness that makes up our world… literally.

Plus, in chapter two of the “Sea Dogs” backup story (continued from Basketful of Heads #1) written by Joe Hill and illustrated by Dan McDaid, spymaster Benjamin Tallmadge’s monstrous scheme is underway as his coerced crew of bloodthirsty colonial lycanthropes prepare to gut the Royal Navy from within!