The Wyrd -- The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger Born
The Gunslinger Born Introduces Comicdom To One Of The Biggest Badasses EVER!
The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger Born
March 18th, 2008 - Confession time: I think the works of Stephen King had a lot to do with the way my brain developed. Seriously. I was reading King at, when I look back on it now, a very young age. Like, 10 or 11 years old. I don't know how or why I got into his work so young, but that's the stone truth, and for years, all other forms of entertainment fell into two categories: fun stuff--comics, cartoons, video games, toys, Star Wars, Indiana Jones, etc.--and READING, which was fun in a way, but was mostly about learning; what the world was like outside my own confines, what horrors were capable of lurking out there in the dark, what people in other parts of the country spoke like, what grown-ups had to deal with--there was a world out there that I felt I wanted to connect to, and my connection was the writing of Stephen King. And yes, obviously, he wrote horror stories. But believe it or not, I don't think that was what was necessarily appealing to me. He also wrote about the blue-collar lives of his characters in such rich and exacting detail, I felt like I knew them, and, by extension, him. So my impressionable young mind, I'm sure, was sizing up people and situations in a Kingsian way; shot through with his wry sensibilities and sometimes-cynical but overall-fairly-positive (in the end) worldview.
And then came "The Gunslinger", a book that seemed to come out of nowhere King had ever brought me before, and I fell instantly in love with the opening lines: "The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed." BAM. How could you not want to keep reading? How could a young, adventure-seeking kid not be instantly dazzled and jazzed by that perfect beginning to a world I badly wanted to know to get to know? I got so into the Dark Tower books, in fact, that my friend and I designated hang-out spots after places in the book, like "The Way Station", and we referred to our other friends as 'ka-tet'. Yeah, we meant it.
The illustrations in the books were awesome, and captured the rich, stark, hot, blasted imagery of King's words so well it was hard to imagine Roland looking like anyone else, or any WAY else. But really, it was King's own writing that brought the world of Roland Deschain to pulsing, hard-worn life.
So when I heard that Marvel was adapting the books into comic form, my initial thought was "WHY?!!". To me, it was unnecessary. How could you improve on it? How could anything be added to the source material that isn't already there? So I avoided it, for awhile, thinking it would disappoint me.
But one day, bored, I decided to give it a shot. And I've got one word for the results of that dalliance:
Wow.
It's as if Jae Lee was born to bring this story to the comics page. I cannot think of an artist better suited to bring the world of the Gunslinger--that broad-stroke mish-mash of Old West/dark magic/post-apocalypse/Middle Earth/shadowland--to life. It's perfect. Something about his harsh, super-high-contrast, swirly-sharp linework just SCREAMS Roland and Cort and Marten (even though my mid-eighties kid's mind always pictured Rutger Hauer as the vile magician, and Lee seems to invoke Johnny Depp meets John Malkovich), and it also screams a message directly to my brain: RIGHT. EXACTLY. YOU GOT IT.
And it's not just how it looks and feels, it's how the story is told; sparsely, with well-chosen panel choices and compositions, with a visual flow that doesn't skimp on the grandeur for all its glorious simplicity. He shows you exactly what you need to see, and shows it to you with an impact that somehow feels like sand-bitten leather gripping your heart. I never thought someone would be able to surpass Michael Whelan's paintings from the original books, but I stand corrected. It's as if they both draw from the same well of artistic inspiration, which is exactly how it SHOULD feel--it should reflect what's in the books, because what's in the books is so good to begin with. But Jae Lee adds his own distinct dagger-hewn stamp to it that I now have trouble disassociating his art with the vision I had originally cultivated from the books in my own head. Well met and (I can't resist) thankee, sai.
And I haven't even begun to talk about the story. The all-important point of it all. My biggest imaginary grievance was--how are you going to bring such a dense, detail-oriented piece of fiction to the comics page without cutting out huge pieces of what makes it work? Well, the truth is, I don't know how you do it, but I know they did.
They've distilled it down to its bare-bones essentials, and shouldn't a story that draws its inspiration from such a barren world BE bare-bones in the first place? It's as if Lee and writers Robin Furth and Peter David came across the bones of the story in the desert and re-built it exactly the way it should have been, giving us a jaw-dropping and achingly beautiful Tyrannosaurus Rex model of The Dark Tower books, distilled to its sun-cracked gunmetal essentials.
For instance, they show what the dark magician Marten Broadcloak is up to in his creepier moments, and though I have not yet read books 5-7, and I don't know if his master is indeed a spider-entity known as The Crimson King in the books (or maybe I just don't remember it), the depiction of this monstrosity, and the realm it inhabits is the stuff of nightmare legend. I mean, there are artists and writers coming up with creepy stuff all the time--every day, probably--but very few of those creations have the archetypal guts that this guy does. And it's not just because he's a huge misshapen spider-human amalgam that rips bodies to shreds and eats them at his leisure, it's because, as Lee draws him, he looks intelligent. It's as if the Crimson King is looking right at you. And THAT's the kind of comic alchemy that doesn't happen enough. And the way he talks--it COULD be considered the same kind of Emperor Palpatine-level mystic prophesying mumbo jumbo that's a dime a dozen with comics villains these days, but somehow, he comes off as so much more menacing. Maybe it's the lack of extraneous punctuation marks, or the apparent directness of what he says. But for some reason, unlike a host of other comic characters (and, to be fair, most of the characters in King's own Dark Tower world, as he can occasionally go off the rails into 'clever'-dialogue land), I believe him.
This book blew my expectations away, all guns blazing. An amazing comic book experience, not to be missed. Then go read the books. Because Roland is one of the coolest characters in all of geekdom. I mean, how much of a badass do you have to be to sacrifice the life of your pet/friend in pitched battle with your fight instructor JUST TO SOFTEN HIM UP?
Go discover the Dark Tower series--first through the stripped-down magic of the comics, then through the full-blooded blast of the books. You will not be disappointed.
For more information visit the Marvel Comics website.
Exclusive Video Interviews: Jae Lee, Peter David & Joe Quesada