Comic Info
Comic Name: Stephen King’s N.
Publisher: Marvel Comics
Writer: Marc Guggenheim
Artist: Alex Maleev
# of Issues: 4
Release Date: 2010
Stephen King’s N. #2
Reprints Stephen King’s N. #1-4 (May 2010-August 2010). A field in Maine houses a horror that seems to attract its victims like flies to honey. Once you are there, you see the ancient stones that once were part of a house, but existed even before the home. There are eight stones, no there are seven stones. It is this illusion that keep its victims. It is the illusion that brought a patient named N. to the site and started a chain of events that could release an unspeakable evil on the world.
Marc Guggenheim adapted Stephen King’s short story from his 2008 collection Just After Sunset for the Marvel Comics limited series Stephen King’s N. The artist Alex Maleev had previously adapted the story as a graphic video collection and provided the art for this series along with Guggenheim.
N. was the only original story presented in Just After Sunset, but it seems like an unusual story to adapt with all the Stephen King material. It has a kind of gothic Lovecraftian horror sense to it, but it also has a strange modern feel with the idea of obsessive compulsive disorders and the power of the media. Something like a mystery spot…if it were truly powerful would become a tourist attraction with a bit of internet and media play.
Stephen King’s N. #4
It almost feels like the beast within Ackerman’s Field wants to be found and is working its way through its victims to find a voice. Each person it claims tells another person and that person tells another person. The beast gains strength through it…almost like the cursed tape in The Ring. This infectious aspect of the story is frightening…the field, the stones…not so much.
Maleev’s art is good, but it would have been nice to have more direction from Guggenheim’s story along with the art. The story jumps from flashbacks to present day and from character to character before they are established. I had a hard time telling how the old woman fit into the story as a whole by how it was presented, and what the stones meant to the people who became obsessed with them. I know that it is part of the mystery and hook, but more description would have maybe propelled the story since it was so short.
Stephen King is a wealth of stories for comic books and that is suddenly come to be realized. N. isn’t the best way to go (I wish some comic maker would just finish The Talisman adaptation). Stephen King’s N. isn’t bad, but it leaves you wanting some of King’s other better novels and short stories to make the jump to comics.
