Dark Tower: The Gunslinger Born [Hardcover]

 

 

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"The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed."

Those words opened the first book of Stephen King's "Dark Tower" series, and they open the chilling, richly-drawn "Dark Tower: The Gunslinger Born." This intense comic series reintroduces readers to a younger, less cynical Roland, and the harrowing tale of how he became a true gunslinger.

It opens with the gunslinger and the man in black, endlessly pursuing and pursued across the desert, and introduces us to their timeless natures.

Then the comic takes us back many years, to when Roland of Gilead was a teenage boy. He and a bunch of other boys are being tutored by Cort, a bondsman who knows all the fighting tricks, and is supposed to teach them to be gunslingers -- or be exiled forever. And when Roland sees his mother in bed with his father's wizard, Marten, he angrily goes off to take Cort's final challenge.

But when his father comes back to Gilead, he reveals that Roland has been manipulated by Marten. To save Roland's life, he is sent to Hambry on an undercover mission for the Affiliation. There he meets Susan Delgado, a beautiful girl who's been bought as the mayor's gilly. As you can guess, they fall deeply in love.

But Roland is still unaware of the dangers that surround him, or a horrific conspiracy to destroy Gilead and the gunslingers -- led by the distant, demonic Crimson King. As Roland's ka-tet splinters, they are framed for the murder of the local mayor -- and the resulting battle will begin the destruction of everything Roland loves...

"Gunslinger Born" is basically adapted from the flashbacks from Stephen King's "Wizard and Glass" novel, so fans of the book will probably already be acquainted with the tragic story of Roland's past. But it's almost as striking in comic form as in book form.

Part of that comes from Jae Lee and Richard Isanove. A lot of adaptations fall flat ("Anita Blake", anyone?), but their detailed artwork gives vibrant life to the story -- sun-dried fields, ruined buildings, ominously darkened chambers, and faces that seem to be riddled with shadows. There are moments of beauty (Roland and Susan's only tryst) and others of pure ugliness like Roland's fight with Cort, or the face of the shadowed, bloody Crimson King.

But artwork alone doesn't make a comic book good. Robin Furth and Peter David recrafted King's unique prose for this -- the dialogue is spare and understated, while the narration has an ironic, regretful quality, as if Roland himself were telling the readers of his story. It's even peppered with the language of this postapocalyptic world ("... set your watch and warrant on it.")

And we get to see Roland back when he was a brash teenager, very different from the grizzled gunslinger at the start. He's strong, brave and honorable, but also very naive. And we get to see other characters from his past -- his careworn father, the malignant Marten, his first ka-tet of teen boys, and his first, tragic love Susan.

And each part of the story has an extra one at the ending, fleshing out the history of the post-apocalyptic Mid-world -- stories of Maerlyn's mirror, the origin of the gunslingers, the devastating event that changed the world, the Crimson King and his ties to Roland, the history of Rhea the witch, and the Charyou Tree ritual. A lot of it has to do with Arthur Eld, the Mid-world version of King Arther.

"The Gunslinger Born" is a haunting, dark comic book experience, nearly as intense as the original text by Stephen King. A brilliant piece of work.

Alright, enough of the fanboy reviews. The artwork in this book is fantastic, and you should buy it for that alone. But all these people gushing about how brilliant this is need to go and actually read a book instead of a comic book. I collected these issues one at a time, and the only worthwhile gems were the extra bits at the end. The story is condensed so much that if you didn't already know the sequence of events from having read Wizard & Glass, you'd have no freaking idea what was going on. This adaptation is like the Reader's Digest version of the Reader's Digest version of the Cliff's Notes version of Wizard & Glass. If all they were going to do was to do an adaptation of Wizard & Glass, they should have taken a lot more time with it, perhaps a year or two worth of issues. But of course, we're in the fast food generation, and no one has the attention span for that. What they should have stuck with was the in between stuff... the "Further adventures of..." if you will.
Don't be fooled by all the gushing of fans who wouldn't DARE speak ill of Stephen King... and really, it's not his fault.. he only authorized it, which is to say, he said "sure, you can pay me more money to bastardize my writing..", which is pretty much Standard Operating Procedure, really... they've been butchering his books by turning them into terrible movies for 30 years now, so, really, what's one more abomination?
That being said, the artwork is beautiful... Jae Lee and Richard Isanove deserve real credit for creating Roland's world perfectly. Now if they could only get Peter David to challenge Marvel to let him actually write a lengthy story, rather than 10 pages of brief snapshots of an epic piece of literature.

Simply a well written, engrossing, story combined with some of the most beautiful art in the industry.

Volumes 1-5 all fall under the category of 'must read.'

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5.0 out of 5 stars Marvel Meets The Master of Horror
Fantastic adaptation. To be honest I found the story of Susan Delgado (wrong spelling?) the worst told of the novel dark tower series, but here it shines. Read more

Published on Feb 22 2008 by Lee G. Stringer

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