Adapted by Steve Niles from an original story by Richard Matheson.I AM LEGEND
Adapted by Steve Niles from an original story by Richard Matheson.
Art by Elman Brown
IDW Publishing
How many times have you thought that about yourself? How many times have you felt alone? How many times have you honestly felt fear or simply wanted to give up?
That is what this story is about.
Over the years a number of people have tried to make a decent adaptation of Matheson’s amazing story of a world overrun by Vampires. Unfortunately, they never really stood up to what the original story was able to do. And that was to scare the heck out of the reader.
Matheson crafted a beautiful story about one man Robert Neville, alone in a world of nightmare and horror and how he struggled to not only survive that world but worked to find out how it came to be in the first place. This is not really a story about supernatural bloodsuckers or shapeshifting demonic creatures.
The real horror of Legend lies in the life of Neville. Each night he listens to people call out his name, “Come out Neville.” Some of them were once his friends, his neighbours. One was even his wife. The horror lies in the life of Neville, as he works to keep his sanity and his mind in a world gone mad. Driving the lost city during the day he seeks to destroy the vampires that assail him at night as well as struggle to find food and the other day to day needs he has to depend on to survive as the civilization that he was a part of has been destroyed for good.
The horror is not in the darkness, but in the life of Neville. In his own fear, and his loneliness. His sense of being alone in the truest sense of the word surrounded by what were once people but are now just the survivors of a once great humanity.
I AM LEGEND first appeared in Eclipse Comics over ten years ago also adapted by Niles and Brown. IDW collected the entire four issues into this beautiful 240 page hardback and now for the first time readers are able to see at one time the true eeriness of Elman Brown’s artwork from start to finish without breaks.
From the moment you open the cover and see the image in the front you know this is going to be the sort of book that was supposed to make a grand effect on the reader. And for almost four decades it has. I AM LEGEND has been the inspiration for dozens of horror writers over the years, and a multitude of stories have visited the world Matheson created in one form or another.
It is easy to see elements of modern Dracula in the story, or Blade, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Stephen King’s “Salem’s Lot” and certainly “30 Days of Night” or some other film or book. That is because I AM LEGEND became a sort of blueprint for the modern Vampire horror story.
The feeling of loss combined with the realization that man has truly lost the evolutionary war between human and monster has never been captured with as much tension or terror as Matheson did with this novel.
Brown worked his own mysterious and eerie art into a weave of majestic yet subtle beauty that stays with the reader for days after you put the book down.
And it is not an easy book to put down. It draws you in, and if you have never read the novel you will find yourself moving emotionally from bitter anger to resolute acceptance of fate by the end. And every other page you will think, “It can’t be any worse for Neville”, only to find out that Murphy’s Law is eternal even in fiction.
After having the chance to read this collection I can’t picture anyone else doing this adaptation other then Niles. And as far as I am concerned Elman Brown is a bloody genius. His art is beautiful, and creates a world almost of it’s own. Just looking at the pages without looking at the words tells the story by itself. Which is difficult to do in most situations but in horror it is even more difficult.
Brown and Niles have given us, along with IDW a truly horrifying story and I am glad it was someone who actually enjoyed the story.