Vampire Rules: Eclipse Comics - I Am Legend

My series on Charlton Heston’s Black Pill Trilogy of movies led me down an interesting rabbit hole.

Night of the Living Dead was a freaking ripoff.  In case you didn’t know that now you do.

I Am Legend (1954) by Richard Matheson is one of the major seminal works of the vampire mythos. It’s up there with Dracula and Carmella, and for my money is lightyears better than Interview With the Vampire. 

It’s one of the first hard science (for values of hard) approaches to telling vampire horror stories in a contemporary setting. Okay, 70 years ago isn’t all that contemporary anymore, but in the big picture, it still plays well.  

It’s been made into three motion pictures. Will Smith’s - I Am Legend, Charlton Heston’s -  Omega Man, and Vincent Price’s - The Last Man on Earth. Matheson lived to see all of these and was never entirely satisfied with any of them.  Last Man on Earth was probably the closest to his 1954 book, in fact, he even wrote the first script, but he was so dissatisfied with the result that he required the producer to use his pen name, Logan Swanson.  Although if you look at the trailer is blatantly obvious where the idea for Night of the Living Dead came from.

However, in 1991, the long-lost and deeply mourned Eclipse Comics made an entirely faithful adaptation in a prestige format of four graphic novels. 

Eclipse arguably invented the modern graphic novel with Sabre in 1978. Their efforts at introducing manga to American audiences were decidedly mixed, but they deserve credit for having made the early effort. As I’ve said before, Eclipse was a powerhouse during the heyday of the Eighties indie comics scene.

That said, their iteration of I Am Legend was kind of a swansong for them.  Things were falling apart for Eclipse in the early 1990s. The founders and publishers, Jan and Dean Mullaney, had had a very ugly divorce. A flood had destroyed their back catalog inventory. Plus, the collapse of the eighties comic book led to its closure in 1993.

Even with the best will in the world, the ending had to be in sight when Eclipse published I  Legend. The dour tone of the book was doubtless accented by the atmosphere of quiet desperation at the publishers’ office. 

Matheson’s work was absolutely nailed in this four-issue take. It was a prestige format with each issue being 60 pages long.

For those not familiar, and as a gentle reminder to those who are, I Am Legend follows the chronicle of Robert Neville, a man who appears to be the sole survivor of a biological war.  Or at least the sole wholly human survivor.  The rest of the human race are half-dead creatures that strongly resemble the vampires of myth.  They live off of blood, and are resistant to gunfire, but will die from a stake in the heart or direct exposure to sunlight.  They are repelled by garlic, mirrors, and the cross. 

The story follows Neviille’s daily routine of dull chores that are required for his survival as his house is laid siege to every night by the animated bodies of his former neighbors.  These vampires are (at first) a lot closer to the Slavic mythos of the vampire, being basically a zombie with only the most minimal of sapience. By day Neville hunts them, driving stakes into their hearts and once he finds out that sunlight is fatal, simply dragging them outside during daylight hours.  By night he barricades himself in his home as they surround his house trying to batter their way in shouting “Come out Neville.”  

As the story progresses we follow Neville on his downward spiral into alcholism, suicidal impulses, and isolation dementia.  

Then he finds a girl, Ruth, in the daylight.  It turns out she’s a vampire too but due to soft science hand waivem a large number of the infected have recovered their sapience.  The zombies are a problem for them too but are relatively easy to deal with.  Neville was the problem they couldn’t deal with. 

He wants to join their society but Ruth tells him that simply isn’t possible.  He’s killed too many of them, including her own husband. 

In the last page of the book, Neville goes out to confront them. Instead of mobbing him, they gasp when they see him.  He realizes what he has become the monster with powers to slip into their homes when they are helpless and leave as the only sign of his passing bodies of their loved ones staked or dragged out of their homes to die in agony in the daylight. He will become a creature of myth to these people. A story to frighten disobedient children. He will be rumor and superstition.

“I am legend.”

Matheson had to constantly fight with his editors to keep them from putting an “a” after the Am.  Hell, I’m fighting with Grammerly over it right now.  But he was absolutely right to title it that way. That single letter “a” would have ruined the title. 

Eclipse’s iteration was rigidly faithful to the novel.  It’s the only other media work to have managed it.  Granted, film was about as far from ideal a medium as you could get for I Am Legend.  Most of the novel is very introspective, it’s all about what’s going on inside Neville’s head.  So it is with the graphic novel. 

This was its strength, however, comic book readers - who were after Eclipse’s primary audience, weren’t cool with the artistic decisions that this required.  As you’ve seen, the book was in black and white, which was tolerable by most comic book audiences by 1991.  However, it was so text heavy it was truthfully closer to an illustrated novel than comic book.  This didn’t sit well with people who were hoping for a comic panel version of I Am Legend. 

The writer in charge of the adaptation was Steven Niles, and if you’re enough of a comic book nerd you’re probably telling yourself, that name is really familiar, where have I seen it before?

You saw it on the first page of 30 Days of Night. I think it’s fair to say that Eclipse’s I Am Legend was a gift that kept giving to vampire fans.  The influence on 30 Days is fairly obvious once you’ve seen the earlier work. 

I Am Legend was one of the last projects Eclipse was able to complete. They threw the dice on something with a, truthfully, niche audience that was never that big to begin with but I will say this, they are loyal.

While it’s not a traditional comic, it is a unique artifact for fans of the original novel.  If you want to read it yourself be prepared to shell out handsomely for it.  The collectors market for this story is hot with each issue going for three figures.  IDW did publish a collection of it twenty years ago that is a little more reasonable if you consider seventy bucks reasonable.

In summary: Eclipse Comics’ I Am Legend is a bold if perhaps text-heavy adaptation… Okay, it definitely was a text-heavy adaptation but it had to be because it was prioritizing Matheson’s prose even if was at the cost of comic book conventions. It was the kind of bold thing that Eclipse was all about. 

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