Dark Tower/Gunslinger Comics

How much more Roland origin do we need?

Here's a spoiler: The last three books stink. Do yourself a favor by reading the first four books and then just imagining what happens to the ka-tet after Wizard & Glass. It's certain to be much more satisfying than what King actually came up with.

The last three books were absolutely fucking fantastic, in my humble opinion.

There's tons of stuff we don't know about Roland's past. I thought a big chunk of the last book was going to talk about the fall of Gilead, but all we got was a quick flashback to Jericho Hill. Which was annoying.

That's why I've been looking forward to this. I actually think the Gunslingers' adventures before he caught the Man in Black had the potential to be more interesting than the series proper. It'll probably suck, but fingers crossed.

exactly

I don't know if fantastic is the word I'd use. I couldn't put them down, to be sure, and they had moments (the final fight in 'Wolves of the Calla" leaps to mind). Mainly, I couldn't wait to see where King was going with this.

SPOILER ALERT; I tried to be deft, but you may want to avoid this next paragraph:

Whatever you may have thought of the ending, and I was initially disappointed myself, after I thought about it awhile, I couldn't think of any other way King could have gone with it. MUCH more disappointing, I thought, was the Crimson King's appearance and demise. I REALLY expected better.

END SPOILER ALERT

And yeah, I also want to find out how Gilead fell, and maybe where Roland got all his magic knowledge. Cort didn't seem to be teaching that.

SPOILERS all over the place here ...

I actually enjoyed the ending ENDING of Book VII. That last line was perfect. Everything before it -- not so much. Specifically the lame-ass Crimson King and the sudden offing of Randall Flagg at the hands of a character who wasn't even introduced until Book VII.

After reading Wizard & Glass, you can't wait to find out what will happen when Roland and Flagg face off again at the end of Roland's journey. The fact that the showdown never comes is beyond disappointing. It's unforgivable.

I have never agreed with a single post more than I agree with this.

"Wolves of the Calla" is good. I'll agree the last two books are a real disappointment, though as has been said, the very, very ending is cool.

I'd set my watch and warrant by the fact that our ka-tet's little palaver is dropping spoilers all over the place, say thankya. Sai El Gray won't be pleased. He may train his hard calibers on us, before this thread moves on. Just follow the beam, the path of the Turtle.

Jae Lee on art? I'm sold.

The early-Roland stories were usually my favorite stuff in the series (and I really enjoyed Wizard and Glass), but the last book left such a bad taste in my mouth that I really have no desire to re-visit the universe. Just awful.

To these cynical ol' eyes it looks like King wanted to give his assistant on the Dark Tower a little more income.

But because I'm a whore for the Tower, I'll be picking these up. At 48 pages per issue, that's a good chunk of story once the tale is told.

...then again, it IS Jae Lee. Pretty pictures or not, the man has a tendency to draw 15 pages of nothing pretty quick.

"Wolves of the Calla" was a decent novel, but "Susannah's Song" and "The Dark Tower" are rather awful. Why? Well, there are about a million Gunslinger-related threads floating around the Boards that discuss why. I will say, however, that the conclusion of "The Dark Tower"--which many people despised, including, I surmise, King himself (at least a little bit)--was brilliant and, in my opinion, the only way to satisfactorily conclude matters. That being said, I'll be picking this series up come February.

SPOILER ALERT...

Now, my question becomes what iteration will the comics depict? (Highlight for Spoilers)Will it be the so-called 19th wherein Roland stops to retrieve the horn on Jericho hill? And if so, will we see any indications that having done so has changed Roland's ka? (End Spoiler).

Have you read "Everything's Eventual"? There's a short "novella" in there called "The Little Sisters of Eluria" which depicts one of Roland's early adventures. It's not a story about his days with Cuthbert and Alain and crew, but, if I recall correctly, takes place at the time he's following the Man in Black across the desert.

BTW, just in case anyone didn't already know, got an e-mail alert from the folks who run the NY Comicon in feb, indicating that Stephen King has just been announced as the guest of honor, shilling these comics. I've always wanted to hear him speak (although, Id' have preferred something other than a "buy my shiny new comic books" spiel to listen to), and I'm really looking forward to this.

I tuned out on Dark Tower with the third book and battle with the giant bear with the radar dish on its head.....

You should probly change you nick if you want people to take your opinion seriously.

I suggest koontzluva

Oh, yeah. These weren't even King's biggest selling books, and you have to fuigure fewer of his readers still are comic book fans. And I doubt very much many who AREN'T fans of the books will be all that interested in these books "just because".

Well, the first one's out. Did anyone (besides me) pick it up? Anyone? The art is amazing, but I was a little disappointed to discover that it was simply a rehash of the Cort-Roland showdown. Still, they're promising new material in the upcoming issues.

I picked it up, mainly because I'm a huge fan of Jae Lee.

So far, I've got nothing. I'll re-read it again, but it's just not doing a damn thing for me. I'll probably just wait until they do a TPB on it.

I dug the first issue...pretty cool story as I've barely read the books. I read a bit of The Drawing of The Three years ago...as for the comic, Jae Lee art always gets me. Afterwards I stopped by Barnes and Noble to pick up the first book and scooped up a boxset of the 1st four paperbacks for 30 bucks...not a bad deal at all considering the books were averaging 17-19 bucks a piece.

My disappointment would have been greater if I hadn't been trepidatious about the whole thing from the beginning. The thing is, I can see good stories coming out of this title once they get past the reheated flashbacks from the books. There's nothing fundamentally wrong with David's script, except that he leans on captions a bit too much and his attempts to do the folksy speech of Roland's world are a bit grating at times (even in the books all that "Do ya, kennit, say thankya" got a little annoying). I am still interested to see what happens after we get back from Mejis.

But man, Jae Lee's art is a serious problem. I'm not familiar with the man's (?) previous work, but I hardly know where to begin. For one thing, he seems pathologically allergic to drawing real backgrounds, so Gilead and environs all seem to be floating in the dreaded Orange Void of Doom. And his rendering of the city is just weird--this is supposed to be the last civilized kingdom in Mid-World; why does it look like an alien ruin designed by Frank Frazetta? Then there's the annoyingly "goth" tone of everything, along with the unfortunate pre-op transsexual Cuthbert and Alain with Down's Syndrome.

Mostly, though, Lee seems to be part of the current plague of comic artists who think that piling on the detail and stylishness and photoreferenced digitalized high-tech whizbangery is an excuse to do away with clear storytelling. Seriously, maybe David is right to lean heavily on captions--even having read this story before, without the captions I would have had a hard time figuring out what was going on.

I'll pick this up again when they get past Mejis, and hopefully, when the inevitable drop in sales causes them to "downgrade" to an artist with actual narrative skills.

I haven't picked this up yet (I'll probably get it at the NY Con in a couple weeks), but does anyone know how they intend to script this thing? Are they going to do things in chronological order, as opposed to the order in which things are told in the books? The Roland/Cort showdown didn't get told until what, the 2d book, right? But they start the comic off with it. Are we maybe going to see Wizard & Glass before The Gunslinger in the comics?

See...I on the other hand love Lee's artwork. Oh well, different strokes for different folks.

It's not that there's anything wrong with the artwork per se. It's just very bad at conveying the story. It's a series of illustrations, rather than a sequential narrative.

The clash between Cort and Roland is in the first book. The story of Roland and Susan is in the fourth book. There's a quick flashback to Jericho Hill in the last book. That's all the backstory we get. It's all in chronological order. There's a huge gap between Roland and company leaving Mejis and the fall of Gilead, room for dozens of stories.

Think they'll fill that gap, or will they limit themselves to what's in the books? I'm kind of of two minds on that; I never liked 'Star Wars" or books like that adding to the story outside the movies, so the purist in me kind of wants them to just stick w/ the script. But by the same token, we have been there & done that; seeing new stuff, esp. about the fall of Gilead, would be kinda cool. Esp. if King has any ideas he'd contribute (I think he had the fall in mind before he wrote the clusterfuck end of the series, so hopefully his ideas on that score would still be good. Hopefully. . . . )

I can't wait to see "EEEEEEEEEE!" drawn out in huge comic book letters across a splash page.

There's only one storyline to be told from the books. If they want to keep going beyond the first arc they're going to have to make up new material. And I'm pretty sure they are doing so.

Yeah, that's true. But that one arc is one HELL of a long arc. If this thing doesn't get the attention they expect, I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't finish even that.

Hilarious.

And yet, now I'm pissed about Book VII all over again. FUCK!

Thanks, Amphibatron.

I picked this up at the COn on Saturday. I liked it. The art isn't as bad as I thought it'd be, from what some here posted previously. But it was too Goddam short. I hope they remedy that in the future. But overall, I think I liked it enough to keep buying it.