INTRODUCTION
Like most comics, the Marvel graphic novels are collaborative efforts. Robin Furth writes stories that the pencil artists break down into pages and panels, converting the prose into visual images. Some pencil artists ink their own pages. In other cases, a dedicated inker performs this work. Most of the time, though, the pencil art is passed directly on to Richard Isanove, who digitally colors the work. From Furth’s story and the illustrations, Peter David creates a script that includes the dialogue and narrative text that a letterer adds to the colored artwork.
ROBIN FURTH
As the writer for Marvel’s Dark Tower graphic novels, Robin Furth has been responsible for translating the story of Roland’s early years into scripts from which her collaborators produce the individual installments of the comic. Her comprehensive knowledge of the series has allowed her to expand obscure references from King’s text into characters and events. At times she has been forced to compress the story line, condensing most of Wizard and Glass down to seven comics, while at other times she has to create stories for times in Roland’s life where King’s books provide only a loose framework.
Furth is originally from Pennsylvania, but summered in Maine, less than an hour from King’s home in Bangor and only a couple of hours from the fictional town of ’Salem’s Lot. She moved to England to do a master’s degree in English Literature at the University of York, which is where she met her husband, British poet Mark Rutter. They both subsequently enrolled at the University of Maine in Orono, which was King’s alma mater. One of her advisers, Burt Hatlen, was one of King’s undergraduate advisers from thirty years earlier, and a close friend of his. When King was looking for a research assistant, Hatlen recommended her.
She continues to freelance for King, is director of the Discordia project for his Web site, and spent time in Hollywood as part of the pre-pre-production team for the Dark Tower films.
The following interview was conducted via e-mail in November 2011.
Q: How did you come to the Dark Tower books and then to the graphic novels?
A: I started working for Steve King back in 2000—the year after his terrible accident. Steve needed somebody to sort through the thousands of responses he’d received for the On Writing story competition. He wanted to help out a grad student, so he contacted Burt Hatlen. Burt knew that I was a writer, that I loved fantasy, horror, and sci-fi and that I was a fan of Steve’s work, so he recommended me for the job. That original project lasted about a month. I did some of my work from home, some from the King office, but most of my contact with Steve at that point was through e-mail. (Most of my work was with Steve’s assistant, the wonderful Marsha DeFilippo.)
At the end of that particular assignment, I went into the office to pick up my final paycheck and met Steve King himself. I was really tongue-tied, but Steve was very relaxed and kind and asked me if I wanted more work. He was about to return to the Dark Tower series and needed someone to write up lists of characters and places and record the pages on which they could be found. (He wanted to be able to double-check for plot and character continuity—no small job for such a large body of work.) Anyway, when Steve asked whether I was interested in the job, I said yes. (Of course!)
Not only did I create a huge dictionary of characters and places and plot twists, but I recorded Mid-World games, Mid-World languages, Mid-World diseases, and pretty much everything else I could think of. I drew a door labeled THE AUTHOR, which was supposed to help Steve reenter Mid-World. I placed the door at the front of the manuscript; then I bound the whole thing in black and taped a key to the front. (The key was so that Steve could open the door.) I wasn’t certain how Steve would react to my wild enthusiasm, but he liked it enough to ask whether I wanted to continue working with his manuscripts. After that, I received draft chapters as Steve wrote them, so that I could continue building my Dark Tower Concordance. I’ve been lucky enough to live in Mid-World ever since.
The collaboration between Stephen King and Marvel Comics really began when Joe Quesada, Marvel’s editor-in-chief, mentioned at a comic book convention that he really wanted to work with Stephen King. Word eventually made it back to King’s office, and Chuck Verrill (Steve’s editor and agent) contacted Marvel. After many discussions, everyone decided that the best book to adapt would be Wizard and Glass, since it told the story of Roland’s adventures in Hambry, when he and his friends were fourteen years old.
I was there at the original meeting between Steve, Chuck Verrill, and Marvel via phone link. I’d spent so long in the Dark Tower universe that Steve thought it would be a good idea to have me on board for the Marvel project. I’d never worked in comics before, but I loved graphic novels and illustrated books, so I was excited about the whole thing. I also wanted to see Roland and his friends take on that extra dimension—to have faces and bodies that moved through space. As you can imagine, my initial learning curve was incredibly steep. But luckily for me, I was working with a terrific team of extremely experienced comic book folks. Peter David, Jae Lee, Richard Isanove, Ralph Macchio, and all the other editors and artists who have worked on the series, have been great. I’ve learned a tremendous amount from all of them.
Q: Your credit on the Marvel graphic novels reads “Plotting and Consultation.” What does that mean?
A: As a consultant, I answer questions about all things Mid-World, from clothing to gun design to landscape and religion. I also answer questions about Roland’s history, or the history of the many other characters you meet in the series.
Plotting is exactly what you’d guess. It means creating the stories that are then illustrated by the artists and scripted by Peter David. Basically, for each new arc, I write a detailed story. (We call this story the story arc or the outline.) I write the arc as one flowing piece, almost like a short novella. I make sure that it is broken down into the correct number of issues/comics. I also break each individual issue into scenes. (I often break the scenes down further into a series of numbered events, which the artist can use as possible panel breaks, but ultimately I always leave the panel breaks/page designs up to the artist, since that is his specialty!)
In my story arcs, the individual issues work like chapters in a book. Reading one of my story arcs is (I hope at least) a little like reading the descriptive breakdown of a film. As I said, each issue is broken into consecutive scenes, one following from the other, and the issue itself always ends with a cliffhanger. The exception is the final comic book of an arc, which must have a sense of closure.
When I’m writing, I make sure that everything in a scene is described in great detail, so that we can remain consistent with Stephen King’s world. I usually describe what characters are discussing in any particular panel. Sometimes I include placeholder dialogue so that the artist knows how to illustrate the panels and pages, but the scripts really are Peter David’s creation. He does a fantastic job, and I’ve learned a tremendous amount about dialogue and scripting from him. He is a terrific writer.
Q: At what point do you discuss the plot with Stephen King?
A: My discussions with Steve really vary according to what we are adapting and what I need to check. Sometimes I send him specific questions about plot direction/characters before I even begin. (I had to do this a lot before I started The Sorcerer.) At other times I send him a brief summary before I begin, just to make sure that he feels okay about the tack I’m taking. Sometimes, when I’m really unsure, I send him the whole arc, just to make sure that he gives it the thumbs-up. Steve has been incredibly supportive of the comics, which has been great.
Q: What is the process after this?
A: Once I’m finished, I send the outline to the Marvel editors for comments. Once the editors have checked the arc, it goes to the artist, who begins his panel and page sketches, and to Peter, so that he can start thinking about scripting and so that he can let us know if he thinks we need to adjust the story. If anyone has any comments, I rewrite. Sometimes Peter can take care of the problem via the scripting. (For example, in The Way Station comics, I had Roland kill and eat a dog that was possibly rabid. Peter made a quick fix in scripting—making it clear that Roland did not eat the infected dog. He was really worried that if Roland ate a rabid dog that he’d get rabies and die!)
Peter really needs the pencils to finish his script, since his captions and dialogue must flow with the images. After Peter writes the script, I get a copy, too, so that I can read through. It’s always a lot of fun to read Peter’s scripts. At that point, the script and panels go to the letterer. The colorist, Richard Isanove, and the letterer can work simultaneously.
Q: Do the artists ask you questions as they work?
A: I answer most questions while the artist is creating the initial layouts. So problems are solved at a really early stage. I get to see the process at every step, which is fantastic. I receive the artists’ initial panel sketches via e-mail, then pencils, then inks and color, and finally the lettered pages. I try to pack my outlines/stories with visual detail to help the artist see Mid-World, but I often get questions about guns, or clothing, or accessories. I remember once, when I was in New York and we were working on The Gunslinger Born, Jae asked me really complex questions about Mid-World etiquette. He wanted to make sure that everyone bowed correctly and did the fist-to-forehead correctly, etc.
One of the most humorous questions came from Michael Lark, while he was penciling the Tull comics. I had written the story as if the weedeater Nort had once pulled a real honey wagon—you know, one that sold honey. Michael thought that Steve was talking about a sewage/manure wagon. I checked with Steve, and Michael was right. Boy, was I embarrassed. Anyway, the joke was on me, but we all had a few laughs about it.
Q: What process goes into the individual essays that are included in each issue?
A: I really try to make sure that each article is relevant to the issue in which it will appear, and so my decisions are based on content. Sometimes the editors make specific requests and ask me to write about topics that they think will be of special interest to readers. For example, I’ve written several pieces about Roland’s guns and the types of guns available to gunslingers. (Apprentice gunslingers don’t use the big six-shooters used by fully-fledged gunslingers. They are much more likely to use barrel-shooters.)
I always go back to the original novels for inspiration. When important info isn’t in the books, I pick Steve’s brain. Since Mid-World and our world are related, I also turn to our world’s history for answers. For example, when I wanted to write about the blue dye that Grissom’s men used to paint their faces, I decided on woad, since both Pictish and Celtic warriors used that dye to paint patterns on their skins. (They used it to terrify their enemies, and I’m sure it did a pretty good job!)
Q: What sort of feedback do you receive from readers?
A: Most of my feedback comes from Dark Tower fans and fellow Constant Readers that I meet at conventions. Sometimes we end up having long discussions about the books, which is always good fun. Most of the readers I’ve talked to or I’ve heard from have been very supportive, which is great.
Q: What deviations from the source material have you found it necessary to make because of the nature of the graphic novels?
A: Adapting a novel to comic book form is a bit like altering a novel so that you can make it into a film. Every medium has its own demands and its own restrictions. In a novel, an author can spend a lot of time using internal monologue, stream-of-consciousness writing and quick flashback. A protagonist can hear voices inside of his mind, just as Roland often hears Cort speak. A narrative voice can be used to explain certain situations, or to foreshadow events, or to explain or comment on something that the protagonist might not know about.
In comics, everything has to be visual. The number of lines that a character can speak, and even the number of captions that can fit on a page, is extremely limited. The story has to be told in a sequence of panels, and then the script has to be extremely tight. An excellent comic book script has the force of fiction but in the limited line length of poetry.
Another difference is the use of flashback. Comics definitely use flashback, but it has to be used more sparingly. The forward momentum of the story has to be very powerful. It is harder to show two characters sitting and having a very long conversation. In a book it works brilliantly, but I have to limit the amount of conversation-without-action.
Comics—as I’ve learned to write them—have a very exacting format. The writers and artists have approximately twenty-two pages to tell a tale. The story has to have a beginning, a middle and an end. The story must be told visually, and the story must move relatively quickly. Each individual story must have a cliffhanger ending, but the individual stories must also fit into a story arc of five to seven comics. (These story arcs are later published in collections where the individual comics become chapters of a graphic novel.) Although the individual comics are often self-contained, the five to seven comics in an arc must tell a cohesive tale, and the arc itself must have a satisfying ending.
In order to fit these requirements, the elements of a story often need to be rearranged. Sometimes I need to add link material, and for this link material I always return to the brief stories that Roland recounts to his tet-mates during his travels through Mid-World. My goal has always been to stay true to Steve’s vision and to introduce people to the wonders of Mid-World. Occasionally that means inserting “new” material so that I can communicate another aspect of Mid-World’s reality, or of Roland’s reality, to new readers. But no matter how I try to do it, my goal always remains the same: I want to make Roland, and Mid-World, as real to comic book readers as they are to longtime fans of the original novels. In the best of all possible worlds, people who read the comics and people who read the novels can have conversations about Mid-World, even though they came there via different mediums.
Q: Where do you stand in terms of the original versus the revised and edited version of The Gunslinger?
A: For the comics, I tend to use the revised and edited version of The Gunslinger. I love the original, too, but I think that the revised version has some really interesting twists, like the addition of “nineteen” and Roland’s continuing sense of déjà vu.
Q: In the graphic novels, it seems like Walter and Marten are distinct entities at times. Are they different aspects of the same creature?
A: In the comics, Walter and Marten are different aspects of the same creature. Flagg is another aspect of this being. When we first started working on The Gunslinger Born, Jae Lee really thought a lot about how to have Walter morph into Marten, and back again. In the end he decided that Marten/Walter could use a hand motion to indicate the change. You can see one of these morphs in chapter four of The Gunslinger Born. Walter is definitely a shape-shifter. And a born liar!
Q: In my interview with King, he is adamant that Farson is not Marten, but in the synopsis at the beginning of Wolves of the Calla, he states that they are the same person. What is your opinion?
A: This is one of those incredibly thorny questions in the Dark Tower universe! When I was writing my Dark Tower Concordance Part I, I thought that John Farson was another aspect of Marten. However, when it came time to finish the Concordance Part II, I had decided that Marten, Walter, and the man in black were all one being, but John Farson was a separate being. I based this decision on Walter’s musings, which Steve King recounts in the Mordred versus Walter section of The Dark Tower. Walter makes it clear that the Crimson King is a separate being, and so is John Farson. Walter served each of them at different times, but he always, ultimately, served himself. The only explanation I can give is that some people believe that Marten is also Farson, but later on we (as readers) find out that this was a false assumption.
Q: Though we learn that the Crimson King is also from the line of Eld and thus a distant relative of Roland in King’s novel, this case is made much more clearly in the graphic novels. What of Marten—is he also related to Roland?
A: The question of Walter’s ancestry was one that really obsessed me while I was working on the one-shot comic called The Sorcerer (now the first chapter of the graphic novel Fall of Gilead). Hence, while I was working on The Sorcerer, I had a long e-mail conversation with Steve King about this very subject. I asked if it was possible that Walter was the offspring of Maerlyn. Steve said yes. He also told me that Walter’s mother was Selena, the goddess of the dark moon. All this meant that Walter was descended from at least one supernatural being. I think that Steve might be rethinking Marten/Walter’s background again, but all of that will become important in The Wind Through the Keyhole!
Q: Roland appears to be at least middle-aged by the end of the series, but he’s more than a thousand years old. What does this mean to you?
A: I’ve spent many, many hours pacing out Roland’s time line. While I was working on the Concordance, I created a Mid-World time line, which is in Appendix II of The Complete Concordance. Basically, I went through the novels and recorded absolutely every reference to time periods and dates that I could find, did some math, and came up with what you can see in Appendix II. Of course, this time line is up for debate! The way I look at it, Roland is an incarnation of the eternal hero. Hence, time doesn’t pass for him the way it passes for other people. He does live outside of time. Like the Ageless Stranger, Roland darkles and tincts—he lives in all times!
Q: Are there stories from Roland’s past that you wanted to tell but the opportunity didn’t present itself?
A: Oh yes, there are many! I really wanted to spend some time with Roland, Alain and Cuthbert as they wandered for years, searching for the Tower, but we just couldn’t do it! After Fall of Gilead, we really had to pick up steam and move forward to Battle of Jericho Hill!
Q: Do you consider the graphic novels to be part of the Dark Tower canon?
A: I suppose it depends on what you call canon. There is only one Stephen King, and his novels are great. Hence, that is the heart of the canon—or you could say it is the canon for purists! If you want to extend your definition a little bit, you could add in the Dark Tower graphic novels. They exist in the same universe and are homage to Steve King’s magnum opus. They are written out of love and respect and they are written with Steve’s support (he has to give his approval to everything), but they are, as I said, an homage. The way I look at it, the Dark Tower has many levels and the many levels contain many parallel worlds. Steve King’s Dark Tower novels exist in Mid-World prime. The Dark Tower graphic novels exist in a spinoff world. Perhaps it’s the world where Eddie Dean and Jake Chambers are drawn together, and they are Eddie and Jake Toren!
Q: Do you have a notion of what “perfection” means in terms of Roland’s journey? How does he break free from his trapped existence?
A: I’ve always assumed that perfection meant traveling farther along the “spiritual” (for lack of a better term!) path that Roland travels in the later books of the series. He has to relearn his humanity. He has to move farther and farther from the man who mowed down every man, woman and child in Tull, farther from the man who let Jake Chambers drop into the abyss under the Cyclopean Mountains and closer to the man who will sacrifice everything to save the children of the Callas. Does that make sense?
PETER DAVID
Peter David says that he was born with laughter on his lips and a sense that the world was mad.
He has a bachelor’s degree in journalism from NYU, but he eventually decided journalism wasn’t for him, though he wanted to stay close to publishing. He worked in the sales department for various publishers, always intending to transition to writing. While writing an article about the now-defunct magazine Comics Scene, he met and interviewed Carol Kalish, who was the assistant direct sales manager at Marvel. She was about to be promoted to sales manager. When she learned the publisher David was working for at the time was about to go out of business, she offered him a job as her assistant.
In that position, he became friends with several of Marvel’s editors and started looking for side jobs writing comics. He wrote for Spider-Man and The Incredible Hulk, and eventually became a full-time freelancer. He has also worked on X-Factor, Supergirl, Young Justice and The Phantom.
He is also a novelist, with numerous books to his credit, including original Star Trek books and movie novelizations. He is part of Crazy 8 Press, a group effort involving several authors who want to make their novels accessible to fans at reasonable prices, using primarily social media to let people know about them. His Hidden Earth series has the epic scope of the Dark Tower series and The Camelot Papers is a revisionist version of the King Arthur legend.
The following interview was conducted via e-mail in March 2012.
Q: Do you have a preference between writing novels versus comics?
A: They both have their advantages. With a comic book, you work with an artist who brings his own talents to the endeavor. A good artist can elevate your story to a level of quality above the script that you’ve written. The flip side is that a lousy artist can drag it down, so that suddenly it seems to the reader as if you’ve forgotten how to write. I’ve had artists who were so bad even I couldn’t stand to look at it. With novels, it’s just you. There’s no filter between you and the reader.
Q: What was your introduction to the Dark Tower series?
A: I read the very first short story when it came out in F&SF. I remember reading it and thinking it was really unusual for King. Honestly, I wasn’t wild about it. I saw what he was going for but thought he hadn’t quite gotten there yet. Then again, Dark Tower has been a fascinating exercise in watching a writer’s development. As compelling as I thought the first entire book eventually turned out to be, I think Steve really found his voice for the series with the second novel, which was a quantum leap over the first. That’s the advantage I’ve had in scripting the comic series: I’ve used the narrative styling of the subsequent books to inform the way I script the series.
Q: Describe your part in creating an issue of the Marvel adaptation.
A: I receive the plot outline from Robin at the same time as everyone else. I read it over and if I have any comments, concerns and observations, I voice them. I’ve had to do that less and less since Robin’s writing has gotten so much better over the years. In terms of actual production, scripting an issue takes me less than a day.
I’ve never actually written script over someone else’s plot before. But there’s plenty of precedent. You see it all the time in television, for instance. A “story by” credit that is different from the “screenplay” credit. It doesn’t happen quite as frequently in comics, but it does from time to time.
Q: Do the artists provide you with some amount of space to enter your text?
A: It’s standard practice for artists to go light on scenery in the upper half of the panel since that’s where the majority of word balloons are going to go. I’ve been doing this for a while, so I can get pretty innovative with where to put the word balloons. Basically I place the balloons on B&W copies of the art using Magic Marker and then fax them to the editors, who are able to use them as guides for the letterer. I never feel constrained. I’ve been doing this for way too long.
Q: Were there times when you found the story going in a different direction than you’d imagined when reading the books?
A: There were any number of times that I was surprised and intrigued with things that Robin came up with. I think, though, considering the admittedly different requirements of novels versus graphic novels, that the comics have been remarkably faithful. If nothing else, one of the reasons I developed the idea of a narrator was because King fans are accustomed to reading. They read a lot. And King’s books are narratively packed. I wanted people reading Dark Tower comics to have an experience akin to reading the novels. Having a narrative voice enabled me to have a natural reason to pack more words on a page in order to accommodate fan expectations for a Stephen King–related work.
Q: Is the process different for issues dealing with parts of the story that aren’t direct adaptations of King’s novels?
A: The difference is that I don’t have to have the novel next to me. When we’re doing stories that have already been told, I feel obligated to use as much of King’s narrative as possible. Sometimes it’s had some amusing results. One review writer swore that I had no feel for King’s narrative at all, and he held up as an example of that a dialogue exchange that I had lifted word for word from King’s prose.
I more or less lifted the tone from King’s writing in Wolves of the Calla. There were townspeople there who spoke in a certain cadence that I thought would be a good style to adopt. Since the series has such scope, I felt having a narrative voice would enable me, as a matter of practicality, to cover gaps in the visual storytelling since there was so much to convey—especially in the beginning—that I felt it would be a handy tool to provide a unifying style. So in my head, I pictured a group of cowboys along the trail, and they’re talking about different legends of Mid-World, and the name that keeps coming up is Roland’s. And I figure there’s this one guy, the eldest of the group, hearing all these conflicting stories. And he spits out a wad of chaw and growls, “All them stories are wrong…and all them stories are right. I’ll tell ya about Roland, the last of the gunslingers. Starts with a desert. A man in black is running across it, and the gunslinger’s following him…” And off we go.
Q: Were you more nervous about King’s reaction to the results, or the reactions of longtime fans of the series?
A: King. Unquestionably. It’s impossible even under the best of circumstances to satisfy everyone. In this case, though, the only person whose opinion I cared about was Steve. If he was happy with it, that was what mattered. I’m reasonably sure everyone else on the project feels the same way. We’re producing this comic for an audience of one. If he’s happy with it, we’re happy with it. If the fans love it, hey, bonus.
Q: Were there particular scenes or story arcs that you looked forward to adapting?
A: The original story line involving Susan that had such long-term ramifications for Roland and also the story line we’re doing now, The Way Station, with the introduction of Jake.
Q: Were there open questions from the novels that weren’t answered by the graphic novels that you wish there’d been an opportunity to explore?
A: The biggest question is the fate of Rhea of the Cöos. To my mind, she looms almost as large in Roland’s personal history, in terms of villainy, as the man in black does. Yet we have no details of their final confrontation other than a passing mention that he had killed her at some point. I would love to do a one-off issue with Robin (and, one would hope, Steve’s input) that told that story. If for no other reason than that I hated Rhea more than any other villainous character in the series, but we never got to see her get hers.
Q: Did the way you work change in the second series, when different artists became involved?
A: It didn’t, really. The narrative style I developed was pretty much artist-proof. That’s another one of the reasons I came up with it. Some are better storytellers than others. The narrator serves as a means of leveling the playing field. With the stronger storytellers, the narrator serves to set the scene, fill out details. With the storytellers who aren’t quite as clear visually, the narrator can inform the reader of what isn’t being shown.
Q: What are your impressions of Roland? Do you find him hard to like at times?
A: Sometimes, yes. He’s obsessed. A zealot, an extremist. He cares about two things only: getting to the Dark Tower and catching the man in black. And the latter mostly serves the former, when you get down to it. Roland may indeed be hard to like at times, but he is easy to understand when you think about the idea that we all have our obsessions. He’s just an obsession taken to the extreme.
Q: What has the fan reaction been like?
A: The fans have been effusive to me in their praise when I see them at conventions, and I’ve also seen mostly positive reviews here and there. The midnight launch parties were amazing. The first one I went to was at Midtown Comics in Manhattan. It was the dead of winter, it was midnight, and there were arctic-level winds blowing through the concrete canyons of Manhattan. I figured we’d get zero turnout. And yet there were over a hundred fans there, thrilled for the opportunity. It was an absolute blast.
Q: Did you ever get feedback from King regarding your work?
A: There were some line edits (including, to my amusement, Steve editing things that were taken verbatim from the books, which just proves that art is never finished, only abandoned) and general comments about the narrative voice that I’d adopted.
The entire team did the series launch at New York Comic Con. We were waiting in the green room when King showed up. You’d expect that someone of his level would have an entire entourage of handlers, but no, in he walked, and it was, “Hi, I’m Steve,” and he’s shaking people’s hands, utterly unassuming. Believe me, I know writers with one tenth the success of Stephen King and ten times the attitude. It was the first opportunity I had to speak with him about my work on the series, and I was so nervous and, frankly, needy, asking him if he was pleased with my scripting. And he put his hands on either side of my face like a benediction and said, “You’re doing a great job.” Which was good because right before he said that, I thought he was about to snap my neck. And you know the roomful of people would have covered for him. “Yeah, Peter tripped and fell wrong. Tragic thing.”
Later, when we were on the panel, one fan in the audience stood up and said, “I just wanted to say that Stephen King is my favorite novel writer and Peter David is my favorite comic writer, so this series is a dream come true for me.” And totally spontaneously, Steve and I high-fived each other. Understand that, to me, it was practically yesterday that I was just another fan, an aspiring writer, standing in line at a Stephen King book signing, and now I was on a panel with him, high-fiving him. How cool is that?
Jae Lee started working for Marvel comics when he was eighteen. He quit art school without a backup plan, worked up a portfolio and took a four-hour train ride to a convention in NYC. Since then, he has worked on series such as Spider-Man, Batman, Uncanny X-Men, Fantastic Four and a book he both wrote and drew called Hellshock.
He has worked on projects outside of comics, including ad campaigns and novel covers. He also illustrated the Donald M. Grant limited edition of The Wind Through the Keyhole. At the time of this interview, which was conducted via e-mail in March 2012, he was working for DC Comics on a book called Ozymandias, one of the prequels to Watchmen.
Q: Were you familiar with the Dark Tower series before you started working on The Gunslinger Born?
A: I never read the series in its entirety until I got the job. Wizard and Glass was my favorite book, so I was fortunate the project revolved around that. And, of course, I’d read most of his classics, It being a favorite.
Q: How did you find out about the Marvel project?
A: Joe Quesada called me up one day and asked if I’d want to work on a Stephen King book. I was floored. Now, the pressure was on to work up some sample pages to present them to Stephen. I didn’t want to get my hopes up too high in case I didn’t get it.
Q: How did you approach the proof-of-concept project for this presentation?
A: I was told to illustrate the opening sequence to The Gunslinger. I had something like two weeks to do it, and I squandered most of that time suffering from artist’s block. Then, at the last minute, my survival instinct kicked in.
Q: Did that early work define the style of the graphic novels, or did you step back and consider the overall scope of the project and start fresh again?
A: So much of the opening sequence was sheer luck. Once I started work on the first issue, I had to take a very deliberate approach and start fresh. In fact, I ended up redoing one of the sample pages to fit better with what I was doing.
Q: Was it a deliberate decision to use a traditional layout for the pages?
A: I didn’t want the reader to be confused about what panel to read next. There were going to be a certain amount of people picking these comics up, never ever having read a comic before, so I made all the panels horizontal to make each panel a mini–movie screen. I stuck with it for the entire run, but realized that approach had a number of limitations. Mainly, it was really difficult squeezing in a full body shot with that kind of approach.
Q: How do you attack a script in terms of layout and panel design?
A: Robin provided a loose plot of each volume. I had to interpret them and break them down into pages and panels. Once the art was complete, I sent them off to Peter to script.
Q: How did you and Richard Isanove interact during the illustration process?
A: I wasn’t sure how well our styles would mesh at first, but when I saw what he did with the sample pages, I was blown away. And we never looked back. It became a symbiotic relationship.
Q: Do you do studies of characters or scenes before you attack what will become the final pages?
A: Yes. I do rough layouts for every page. I don’t make them too tight, because that only leads to disappointment when I do the finished pencils because the tight pencils will never have the same energy or flow the sketches had and that can be infuriating.
Q: Do you prefer working on established characters or do you like to introduce new ones?
A: I preferred working on characters that I could use descriptions to guide me. If the character isn’t described in detail, there’s more responsibility on my shoulders and that can get scary.
Q: How long does it take to create a typical issue?
A: It varies tremendously. I would love to say I can do a book in thirty days, but I’d be lying.
Q: How much back-and-forth was there among you and your collaborators?
A: We all wanted to be faithful to the source material, so we were all open to suggestions. We just wanted to do the best we could.
Q: Do you have a favorite panel or sequence from your work on the series?
A: I’d have to say the fight sequence between Roland and Cort in the first issue of Gunslinger Born.
Q: Is it different illustrating a novel?
A: The stuff I did for Marvel was a comic book. This is very different. This is a novel accompanied by a number of full-page illustrations. Some are in color, some in black-and-white. I think close to twenty images. I did the cover as well. All the line art is hand drawn and the coloring was beautifully rendered by my wife, June Chung, digitally. Few things I’ve worked on are as cool as doing the illustrations for The Wind Through the Keyhole.
RICHARD ISANOVE
Richard Isanove colored every issue of the Marvel graphic novel adaptations, providing a consistent look and feel to the series over its nearly six-year publication run. He was also the sole illustrator for the Fall of Gilead series, The Sorcerer and Sheemie’s Tale.
Isanove is originally from Bordeaux, France, where he was introduced to American comic books. When he was eleven, he told his school class that he wanted to be either a comic book artist for Marvel or an astronaut. Both of these professions seemed equally unlikely for a kid growing up in France.
He attended École Nationale Supèrieure des Arts Décoratifs (ENSAD) in Paris for five years, where he studied fine arts geared toward animation. Because he spoke English (his mother is British), he was able to get a post as an exchange student at California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) in Los Angeles in 1994, where he also studied animation.
When San Diego–based comic book studio Homage opened Top Cow in LA, Isanove—a longtime comic book fan—applied for a job, though he was still in school. He was hired based on his paintings and was introduced to the world of computer coloring. After Top Cow, he received an offer to work on Daredevil for Marvel. It was his childhood dream come true.
He met his wife—who works in animation as an editor—and has remained in the United States ever since, although his wife’s job has moved them around a lot over the past four years, including a year back in Bordeaux. He has done over five hundred covers for Marvel, including work on just about every title and character. He has done major series of Spider-Man, Wolverine and the X-Men. He started developing a computer painting technique that went beyond simple coloring, where he worked directly from pencils instead of inked art while working on Wolverine Origins in 2001.
The following interview was conducted via telephone in November 2011.
Q: Was it a big transition to move from animation into comics?
A: Not really. Both deal with storytelling. We do what animators do in layouts or storyboards. Animation is the more tedious part of it. Doing the storyboards and figuring out how to tell the story was always my favorite part. The biggest challenge and the most interesting part. When I drew some episodes of Dark Tower, it was always the most exciting part. There’s about a week of just doing layouts and sketches, figuring out how to tell the story in pictures. After that, it’s almost a routine. It’s still interesting, but the most stimulating part is doing the storytelling. And that’s common to both animation and comics.
Q: Because of the way the Dark Tower is being created, you actually have more creative input into the layout than a traditional comic because Robin Furth is just providing outlines.
A: It reads almost like a short story. It says SCENE ONE and then it’s a few paragraphs of describing what happens in the scene with bits of dialogue, but it’s more prose than a scenario. It’s really great. It would be harder now to work any other way because it’s so cool. She’s very open to suggestion. We’re working on the one-shot right now about Sheemie. I’m able to negotiate with her to get things I want to draw. We shape the story together. Often, also, to put everything she puts in would take forty-eight pages and we only have twenty-two to twenty-eight. You’re allowed to do the cuts yourself, but I like to go back and forth with her until we are both happy with what there is. There’s been a lot of back-and-forth and deciding what we keep and what to cut out and how to tell that thing more efficiently, or what would be more interesting visually, and then she just rewrites it until we’re both happy with it. It’s a very satisfying work process. She’s so easygoing and very enthusiastic about everything.
Q: Were you familiar with Stephen King’s work when you were asked to work on the Dark Tower series?
A: I used to date a girl in college who was a huge Stephen King fan and she always wanted me to read The Gunslinger. She was such a fan of it, I frowned on it just to bust her chops. I started listening to books on tape when I was working on X-Men and Daredevil. That’s when I listened to my first Stephen King. It was Bag of Bones, and he read it himself. I was looking for books that authors read themselves. I thought it was really cool. I loved it, and ever since, probably at least a third of the books I’ve listened to on tape were Stephen King’s.
Q: How did you react when you were offered the chance to work on a project with Stephen King?
A: After Wolverine Origins, I thought, okay, that was my Mount Everest. There was so much publicity about it and it was such a big seller that I didn’t know how to top it. Then I got Neil Gaiman’s 1602 and I said, okay, cool, I get to work with Neil Gaiman. How was I going to top that? The next thing I know I’m working with Stephen King. I don’t know what else. Maybe I’m going to get the new Bible to illustrate or something.
Joe Quesada knew I was a big Stephen King fan. I had already talked about it with him. Once I said, “Why don’t you guys get Stephen King to write something for you?” At the time that’s when Stephen King had decided to retire. So they thought, it’s not going to happen. Then Quesada called me back a few years later. “You’re a big fan of Stephen King, aren’t you? What do you say about coloring a few pages by next week?”
Q: Short notice for a very important presentation.
A: Yeah. They called me on Tuesday and the next Wednesday King was supposed to come in. Jae started drawing the pages. They started coming in on Friday, I think. It was supposed to be three pages. Then it became four pages. Then it was four pages and a cover. It just kept adding up.
King was coming to the Marvel office on Wednesday morning at nine a.m. Since I’m on the West Coast, it was six in the morning for me. They had to put the whole presentation together before, and they wanted to print it out on big boards with a fake “The Dark Tower” to pretend they were doing a whole cover. We were just cranking, and it turned out that Jae finished the cover on Tuesday night. I was still coloring the pages. He sent it in, and I had too many windows open and my computer crashed just as I was uploading the last cover. I had just finished that huge background of the double-page spread on pages three and four. Because of the way it crashed, I was able to recover the file. It was a miracle. I had worked for four to six hours on that background. It was this massive thing of clouds. I was trying to show off. I was like, okay, what do I do good? Clouds! Clouds and sunset and all that. And it worked, because I guess in that first interview Stephen King was saying that when he saw the purples and all that, that’s when he was sold.
It was really cool because Jae was a big fan of the books, too. I’d read pretty much everything I could get my hands on except the Dark Tower. Since it started to seep into the other books, I knew I had to sit down and listen to it. There’s a copy of The Gunslinger that King had recorded, but I had the one recorded by Frank Muller. I had tried a couple of times and I just couldn’t get into it. The tone is so different from everything else he does. It was not what I wanted in a Stephen King book. When I started working on it, of course, I played it through. And, actually, The Drawing of the Three is probably my all-time favorite of his books. Once I got into it, I kind of enjoyed the first one, but the second one, I was so excited about it. I really loved it.
I like that you can connect to his characters right away. Within a couple of pages, you feel you understand the characters because they’re always bright, or people that you can relate to because they always do the right thing but still things are bigger than them. It’s not like in horror movies. People jump out just as the monster is coming. No, his characters stay hidden, but they still get fucked. They react like you would. Especially in Bag of Bones. All the feelings that he was tapping into are so realistic that within a few pages I was totally engrossed in the book.
And that’s usually how it works. But in the Dark Tower, since it’s also told in such a descriptive way, it takes a while to get into it. The tone is almost grandiloquent. I listened to it twice from beginning to end and bits and pieces, depending on what we were working on. I wanted to refresh my memory on the scenes. The second time I listened to The Gunslinger, I enjoyed it greatly because now I knew who Roland was and I was just happy to be with him again. That’s the thing: there’s not much character development in it. You discover him through the story. But once you know the character, you enjoy The Gunslinger much more. In the Tull story, he’s kind of a jerk. He really grows as the book goes. Even in The Drawing of the Three, he’s still kind of there, but because he is weakened physically, you relate to him. I think it really was a stroke of genius; cutting his fingers off at the beginning of the story just suddenly made him human when he was this archetypal jerk, a guy that guns down people just because he doesn’t like them. As it went, suddenly he became more human and from then on you cared about him. As soon as he gets wounded, suddenly the whole paradigm changes on him and it really becomes very engrossing.
Q: Without the inking step, how is the pencil art conserved when you paint it digitally?
A: The line is still there. That’s why I like to work from pencils—the frailty of the line shows more. When you look at a painting, even at a Frazetta, sometimes you can still see the line appearing through the paint. That’s what I’m trying to do—have the color cover everything but still have the line show through. I put a color in the line art so it becomes one with the color instead of being a layer of black with a layer of color underneath. I’m trying to reblend the two as if it was in the painting. Use the line art as a contrast element, not just as an incisive line. It’s not just there to separate the red from the blue. There’s going to be a little bit of purple in it so the two colors blend within the line art. It’s a darker value of the color, but it’s usually not totally different. It’s part of the color vocabulary.
With Jae, the work we did at the beginning was to integrate the blacks, because he likes to use big black areas. I started to put that splatter into it. I use a lot of toothbrush splatters. I have five different patterns and densities of toothbrush patterns that I scanned that I reuse. Then I fill with color and I superimpose them to get different densities. That allows me to integrate the line art into the color, because color is put into the line art.
Q: Is this a process that would only work with a computer?
A: When I used to paint, I always liked using a toothbrush. It’s a great finishing instrument. It gives a grittiness to the page. It gives textures and makes it a little bit more interesting. I used something similar on Wolverine Origins, but I was using a canvas texture. I scanned a canvas where I did some rough gray-scale painting on it. I used that texture to have two layers of color. When you look at a canvas painting, you put on a first coat of paint and then, if you go with a drier brush, you’re going to have the full color; and then, as there is less paint on the brush, only the top layer of the canvas is going to be affected, so the grooves keep the original color and the second layer of color only appears on the upper layer of the canvas. It creates a pattern and that’s an easy way to blend colors. I always thought that was a very interesting way to have two different values, two different colors, appearing at the same time, like a screen painting. That’s what I was trying to do with the splatters because Jae said he didn’t want me to use that effect.
On 1602 I did it by using etchings, because in the drawing he did all of these little etchings at forty-five degrees, so I tried to mimic that with the color, so the whole book is just made with forty-five-degree etchings of different colors. It seems almost impressionist. By putting two colors next to each other, you get a third color. Instead of mixing them, I would have a green and a slightly bluer green and you come up with an interesting aqua with lots of textures to it. That’s what I’m trying to attain there. Jae wanted something different on The Dark Tower. He didn’t like the canvas, and I was fed up with the etchings. I wanted to do something else anyway. I always used splatter as a finishing tool and I said, how about making that the main thing? Since the world is coming to an end, that will give this impression of having dust in the air all the time. Pretty much it’s like colored dust all over the whole book. I liked the idea from the Ridley Scott movie Legend, with Tom Cruise. There’s always dust in the air in that movie. There are always particles floating around the characters to create depth. You could actually feel the light. I thought it was a perfect vehicle to explore that, to have this impression of thick air. No matter where you go, you’ve got this dust that’s defining the space.
Q: Do you have color themes for characters or settings?
A: Definitely. Each character has a color scheme, usually. Roland, in the first series, he was pretty much the only one in black-and-white. I would always put hints of colors on people except for the Coffin Hunters, who were all in black. All the main characters have a different scheme, at least for every story arc. Depending on where they are, I try to assign them a very recognizable color so right away it gives a visual cue. It goes with the storytelling aspect of it. If you have a blue character circulating through the page, your eye follows him.
At first, Roland was wearing yellow, Cuthbert was red and Alain had this blue, so I had the three primary colors. He had a blue handkerchief around his neck. So it was like the three primary colors. No matter where they went. Everything else was earth tones and black-and-white, except for those three guys that had primary colors. As it went, I liked that Roland was always in black-and-white. His shirt went from yellow to white. Then he was always wearing this white shirt and he was the black-and-white character when everything else around him was in color, or very strongly color-themed. Now, when he’s grown up, he wears the primary colors because everything is always grayish or brownish. He’s dressed like Superman in the middle of all that. I tone down the yellow depending on the general color scheme. I keep the color scheme of the pages in the greens. I’ll tone down the shirt, which is yellow, and the pants, which are blue. Make the pants more blue-gray and the shirt a little more brownish, but then the neckerchief is really bright red so he stands out in a page no matter what happens. Since I have the three main colors, whatever I need to pop, I pop and just fade the rest away. The idea is that he’s always identifiable right away when you look at the page, that he doesn’t get lost in the page.
The main criteria for the color scheming is to make sure that the storytelling is clear and that the mood is right. I usually start by doing the background. I look at the composition and I build the clouds and my color schemes around the mood of the scene. You look at the colors and you can tell how they make you feel. I gravitate toward colors if it’s a happy scene, which there’s not that many of in this. If it’s more of a disgusting or a sad scene, I build up colors until I feel by looking at it the way the scene is supposed to feel. Then I fine-tune it and I work from there. I start to add the characters. I put in the line art and I start working from there. It’s mostly about achieving good storytelling and the proper mood of the scene.
Q: The layout for the Dark Tower graphic novels is more basic than some of the contemporary graphic novels.
A: From the beginning, Jae only did horizontal panels. The idea was that it was readable by anybody that picked up the book. Newcomers to comics have a hard time reading them because the panels go in every direction. You have to learn how to read them. You have panels inside of panels going into something, and if your eye is not trained to do it, you don’t know how to do it. We knew we were talking to people who maybe hadn’t read comics before, so we had to make it very easily readable and have the most simple layouts possible, one plane after the other. When Michael Lark did that wide-screen thing, he fell into that same tradition of one shot after the other. It’s almost like a storyboard. Just go down the page. That was really in the right spirit for the book. That’s one of the key reasons why the book works. I can give it to my mom and she’s able to read it.
Q: How much do you interact with the pencil artists during this process?
A: With Jae, we talked at length because we worked for four years on the first thirty issues. That takes a lot of your life. We talked a lot on the phone. But now, with the rotating pencilers, it’s been a little bit less of that. In a way, it’s gotten more interesting for me because I have to reinvent a little bit every time, to adapt to the new pencilers. To find a way to make their work gel with mine so we can keep the look of the book consistent, but at the same time still be faithful to what they are trying to do.
My learning process is figuring out how the artist likes to light things. Some people are very inconsistent. They’ll have one front character lit from the left and the background is lit from the right. It looks great in black-and-white, but once you put the color on it, it doesn’t make any sense anymore. The liberties they take with lighting become obvious, so you have to figure out how to make it still work and figure out different ways of making the light seem coherent.
Jae draws better than I do, but he looks for the same thing in artwork, which makes my work very easy. We think the same way about lighting. He has a very strong sense of composition and light. I don’t even have to plan what I am doing because I know things are going to be exactly where they should be. I look at it for two minutes and then I jump on it and know that there are no traps in it. Everything I need to build up my color composition is going to be in the line art, and I can just rely on it. He’s such a solid artist that you can just go blindly on him and it’ll always work.
Most of the people they’ve hired are people who ink themselves or, like Michael Lark, work very closely with their inker. He draws and he uses 3-D backgrounds, so the inker meshes the two together. If I had to do it, that would be much more work. It makes it easier if the texture work has been done on the background. That integrates the character much better than if he sends me the characters and the backgrounds on separate layers. His inker and he seem to have that process down where it really looks good. I think he is used to being very controlling on his things. At first he would say, “No, that highlight is too bright.” And I’d say, “Why don’t you relax? Take a day or two, then come back to it. You’ll see.” I would do the corrections and I could see that he liked things a little less shiny than other people. Once I got his trust, I was able to go back to my way.
Q: What was your favorite section to work on?
A: The first part was really interesting because it was setting everything up. It was the most challenging, intellectually. We worked on it for one year before anybody saw anything. That was really hard. One aspect of comics is instant gratification. You put something out and two weeks later it’s in the store. If you messed up something, you say, “Oh, that doesn’t work. I have to change it next time.” There we worked in the dark. I had no idea how it was going to be perceived, and we didn’t know if the book was going to work or not. Spending a year of your life in the dark like that was very weird. But it pushes you to do your best because you say, “Okay, I have no excuse to mess up. I’ve worked on that. I can’t really release a half-finished thing.” It’s probably the most time I’ve had to spend on something, because we only did two issues in that time, just because of the insecurity, mostly. Jae wanted to rework every page until it was perfect, and I was doing the same thing. I was spending two, three days on a page just to make sure that I got everything right and that we came out of the gate running, not stumbling.
After that, I really liked the second story arc. That was interesting because it was the first original story. Everything else was based on the book. Since I had read the books, all those scenes were already laid out in my brain. Then, suddenly, on The Long Road Home it was all new.
When you were talking about color themes, each scene was very strongly color keyed in a different scheme, every time. For the first run, I made a purpose of not repeating any color scheme unless it was exactly at the same time and at the same place. Each one, I would go back and say, “Have I used exactly those colors? No. Okay, so I can do it”—which was not easy and I probably made some mistakes, but overall it was pretty much the goal.
The Long Road Home, colorwise, that was when I started to really be at ease. Doing original material was really liberating because I didn’t have any preconceived images in my head. When the pages were coming in, I was able to do whatever I wanted. Or be spontaneous. There’s some pretty cool stuff in there. I was really happy. And, of course, the one I drew. I was so focused on my pencils. I colored it, but I was not as inventive as I could have been, I think. There’s always pros and cons to every situation, but the time constraints were so bad that I had to rely on what I knew how to do so I could focus on my drawing.
I love doing Arthur of Gilead. Especially on the backstories when we did all that medieval gun stuff. It’s fun to draw the armor and the guns and all those things. It calls for very epic visuals. I just love that stuff. I got these really cool copies of Wild West guns and things like that all over the house. Cowboy hats and swords. My office is a shrine to the Dark Tower. My life revolves around that, or it has for the past six years. I’ve done a couple of Spider-Man things on the side, but most of what I do is Dark Tower.
Q: What was it like to work on one of the arcs as the solo artist?
It does take a lot out of you to draw pages. I don’t know if people realize how much work is involved in doing comics. When I drew Fall of Gilead, it took me about twelve hours to draw a page and then I still had four to eight hours of coloring on top of it. So when you have a twenty-two-page book to do in a month, you don’t sleep a lot. The eight months I spent on Fall of Gilead, I gained ten pounds and I got gray hair. I always wanted to do it and I was really glad to do it, but I was totally dead by the end. It took me a month to physically recover from it. I had a month off, but the good thing was that I went back with Jae, who I had been working with for twenty issues by then, so I knew what to do.
I was so happy to get to do Fall of Gilead. I mean, we kill everybody. It was awful. We had to go back and forth over the fine points of somebody’s death. For the death of Steven, there was a little back-and-forth between Robin and me. We knew he was stabbed by somebody that was never found. That’s all we knew from the book. We had to elaborate the story around that. He’s Steven Deschain. He’s got to die a hero. He can’t really just get stabbed in the back by a traitor. We made up that whole scene where he gets back up again. And then we said, “Well, he has to kill the guy that killed him at least. How do we get rid of the body? He falls out the window when Steven shoots him in the head. There we go; it’s solved!”
I gave that book to a friend of mine recently and he went, “Man, that was dark.” It’s true. You get attached to those characters. They’re such heroes. They’re bigger than life. And then to see them die so quickly and so irrevocably, every time. Even as a reader, that was one that I really enjoyed. When you see the epic battle coming and you think they’re going to win—and, no. You don’t see that stuff. We kill everything. The dogs, the babies. Everybody dies. It’s great. Robin went out of the way on this. Maybe I shouldn’t be reveling so much in massacres, but it was a great story arc.
Filling in the blanks from the books was a stimulating exercise, because you know there are watchful fans reading this thing that are going to catch any mistake that you make, so you have to be very consistent with the book and at the same time manage to make it an interesting story. Robin’s way of working is unique and it makes everybody really involved in the process, so it’s a very satisfying experience.
Q: Do you have favorite characters?
A: Of all the characters, the man in black/Walter is probably the funnest one to draw. Jae established him as almost androgynous. He’s always got this bare chest, and he’s very feminine in the way he moves, with his hands raised. He’s always moving his hands around. He’s got this weird face, with a broken nose and greasy hair. He’s starting to bald, but he’s always got a very white separation in the middle of it. He’s just so greasy, he’s great to draw. And he still has to be seductive at the same time, so you can’t make him repulsive. We went another direction on the one-shot, but I thought it would have been fun to have “The Tales of Marten,” you know, having him like the ghoul from Creepshow introducing every story and saying how he’s related to it. He’s a great character.
I love Cuthbert, too. I like the wise-ass. It’s me ten years younger. I have the long hair and everything like him. That’s the one I have to least change when I draw him. I’ve really put myself into him. When I was drawing him, I thought he’s always having a joke. Even in the worst time, he’s always cracking up a joke. He’s a very charming character.
I use my kids as models. We did a backstory of the youth of Rhea at one point. That was my daughter. I made her teeth crooked and all that, so she would look evil. But she was very proud of it. She was six or seven at the time, so she brought it to school and her teacher was like, “Ai! Let’s not show it.” It was one where she has a shard of glass in the eye with a spatter of blood on her face. He literally jumped out of his seat and grabbed it out of her hand before she could show it to the other kids.
Every time there’s a kid, it’s one of my kids. My son plays Sheemie and my daughter plays all the other characters in the Sheemie story. It’s a family project. They each have a cover that I made with them on it. Matthew has a Sheemie cover in his bedroom. My daughter played Aileen. There’s a cover where Cort is all bloody and there’s a girl crying behind him, and that was my daughter. I made a printout once and she wanted it in her bedroom, so she has a fat guy bleeding in a chair in her little yellow room with butterflies on the wall.
Every year, when the teacher finds out what I do, they say, “Oh, can you come and do a presentation at the school, to show the kids comics?” Since I’ve been on the Dark Tower, it’s harder to do because it’s hard to find a page without blood everywhere. Here’s the one with a guy with pustules all over his face. This one is where he gets his hand chopped off. Great! Let’s keep going. It’s probably the bloodiest book I’ve ever worked on by far. And that’s the worst part—my favorite pages are always the ones where some guy is getting blown up, because you’ve got some really nice red contrast on the page.
Q: What sort of feedback have you gotten from Stephen King?
A: When we started, he said, “You know what? You’re the artists. You do your thing. As long as it doesn’t bug me, I’m happy with it.” Now they only tell us when there’s a problem, and there haven’t been that many. Mostly continuity things or using something from another book that we didn’t have the rights to. Jae was a big fan, so he wanted to put allusions to other books but he couldn’t. I’m down the line, so I get the watered-down thing. They try to resolve any problems before they get to me, which is nice. That’s really the job of the editor, so we can just worry about doing the pages.
King sent a note when we did The Sorcerer, since it was an offshoot. It was not in the general story line. It was Robin’s original story and all that, so he said he really enjoyed it, so that was very cool. I’ve been very lucky. Every time I’m pulling an all-nighter and I start to bitch, I just think, “You know what? I could be doing something that isn’t as much fun,” so I just shut up and do it.
MICHAEL LARK
Like Robin Furth, Michael Lark, pencil artist for The Battle of Tull, is originally from Pennsylvania, but considers himself a native Texan. He studied design and advertising at University of North Texas on an art scholarship but found it not to his liking. He wasn’t into superheroes as a kid, so he wasn’t into comics until he went to the local comic book store with the drummer in his band in the mid-to-late eighties. Here he discovered the independent, alternative black-and-white underground comics of the era and decided he could draw those himself. His first comic was published and his reputation grew through word of mouth. When people offered to hire him to do superhero work, he decided that was a good way to earn a living. He started with DC and then moved to Marvel. His first superhero gig was drawing Superman for a graphic novel written by Roy Thomas. He drew Batman for Gotham Central, and has spent time working on Daredevil, Captain America and the Punisher and Spider-Man during his twenty years in comics.
The following interview was conducted via telephone in November 2011.
Q: Were you familiar with the Dark Tower series before you started working on the Tull book?
A: I was familiar with it, but when they asked me to start working on it, I hadn’t read the books. I’m a huge fan of Steve’s writing in general. I have a lot of respect for him as a craftsman and as a writer and love his books, but because there were seven books, I had never gotten into them. I started reading when they first started talking to me about it and very quickly came to the Tull story and I e-mailed them and said, “I don’t know what you’re working on right now, but if you happen to hit that anytime soon, I would love to do that.” Sure enough, the timing just happened to be perfect. I’d like to do more on the book. It was one of the most satisfying experiences I’ve had drawing comics.
Q: What is your process for an issue of The Battle of Tull?
A: Dark Tower is a little different from some others in that Robin writes a plot. She numbers the panels, but she doesn’t break them out into pages and she doesn’t write finished dialogue. The script might end up being eight, nine, ten pages long. That’s what I get. She’s got suggested dialogue in there that I think she’s pulled directly out of the books. I draw from that. In this case, I’m the penciler. Sometimes I ink my own work. In this case I was just penciling. I have a collaborator that goes over everything in ink, just because of the time constraints of working on a monthly comic. From Robin’s plot/outline, I then decide how many pages each scene is going to take up. A lot of times with her plot there will be one thing that she’s broken down as one panel that I’ll say, well, there’s three or four things happening within that little description so I’m going to have to break that into four different panels. And there’s sometimes where she’ll break things apart that don’t necessarily need to be broken apart. I have to sit down and work with the plot that she’s given me and figure out how the pages are going to be broken up and how to lay things out by panels. Once I’ve done that, I start gathering up references and drawing from that.
Q: Some of the other artists sent pencil art to Richard Isanove. How does inking come into the process?
A: When I came into the book, I didn’t realize that we really had the option to do that. We ended up doing that on the final cover and I was really happy with the results. The ink is more a traditional way of doing it from the old days with much more simple color separation and printing processes. The black-and-white art would be the black part of the CMYK. The K part of the CMYK. Now we can do a lot more sophisticated stuff with it, and it’s really not necessary to do it that way anymore. We still end up doing it that way because it’s more traditional. The pencil art doesn’t reproduce as well.
Q: The early page layouts were designed in anticipation of people coming to the comics who weren’t traditional comic readers. Did you feel you had the flexibility to be more contemporary or experimental with the layouts?
A: I didn’t know that. Nobody told me that. It makes sense because I always thought that the way Jae Lee drew it almost looked like illustrations for a story rather than a comic. That’s very appropriate for Jae’s style of drawing. I actually made the choice because of the fact that I was working on the Tull story, which was almost a straight-up Western with horror and supernatural overtones. I was coming from the same inspiration that Steve had originally, which was the Clint Eastwood spaghetti Westerns. I wanted to use a lot of horizontal panels to get that wide-screen feel. I made a conscious decision to use as many horizontal panel layouts as possible, and sometimes breaking each of those rows into two or three panels if I needed to have some close-ups, or smaller images. That was my decision on it. The way Robin wrote the scripts made it really easy to do that. A lot of writers will give me scripts with seven or eight panels on a page and that’s not an option when they do that. I was able to lay out the pages with three, four panels on a page and get that across.
Q: Do you do your own bubbles or areas for dialogue and commentary to be added in later?
A: I normally do that, but because of the fact that Peter David would then write the dialogue after my penciling was done, I didn’t have that as an option. I was working from the dialogue that Robin had given me and guessing where things would go. Peter’s a pro and he just made everything fit. I think there were a lot of times where I probably didn’t give him a whole lot of room and he made it work.
Q: How much did you feel like you could go your own way in depicting Roland? Did you have to refer back to the way the previous artists had made him look?
A: I think they did a really good job designing him and it was really just a matter of aging the character that Jae Lee had drawn. I tried to make him a little rougher around the edges because he was older. His character is becoming a little darker by the time I got to draw him. It was a combination of this young, fresh-faced kid that Jae drew and Clint Eastwood. More like the Unforgiven-era Clint Eastwood to me. I grizzled him up a little bit.
Q: What’s your approach when it comes to introducing new characters like Allie, Sylvia Pittston or Nort the Weedeater?
A: It was a little intimidating to be working on these characters that I knew people were so familiar with and had visions in their own heads of what they would look like and how they would act. All I could do was try to keep the freshest perspective I could and try to do them justice. I don’t know how successful I was. I have yet to have somebody come up and say anything negative, but I did see one forum where somebody was complaining about the fact that we never saw Roland’s eyes in the first issue. Which is true, because he has his hat on for the entire issue. He is just shadow down to his nose in the whole first issue.
Nort was easy. The toughest one for me was Allie, because I didn’t want her to be ugly. I wanted her to be attractive. I don’t know how successful I was. The other characters were pretty easy. Sylvia Pittston was an interesting story. I use models to reference all my characters when I draw. All of the male characters are me. I alter them accordingly. I have an assistant who helps me out, and she was Allie. She was a little thin girl, and I needed somebody bigger than life for Sylvia. I had put out an ad that said I needed a larger-sized female model and had a really hard time getting somebody. I drew the cover that Sylvia is on using somebody that was a friend of a friend, but she wasn’t really that interested in being a model. She was just doing it as a favor.
Then I got this response to my ad and went to meet this woman. When we e-mailed each other before we met, she said, what are you working on? And I said I’m working on a thing that Stephen King has created. I walked in the door and she goes, “It’s Dark Tower and I’m going to be Sylvia Pittston, aren’t I?” I was like, “Yes, you’re hired.” To me, she was Sylvia Pittston. She was bigger than life, with this huge personality. She had the crazy wild hair. She was fantastic. She made the character so easy to draw. She just made her come to life for me.
We finished our first session, shooting all the photos for the first issue she was in. I called her up to schedule the session for the second issue that she was in. Just days before I called her she’d been diagnosed with leukemia. It was pretty sad. She came and did the second session but the last one we needed to do, she’d already been undergoing chemo. They had to raise money, and I ended up donating all the pages that I had drawn that had Sylvia Pittston on them to a fund-raiser for them and Steve donated a signed copy of one of the limited-edition hardbacks for them to use for the fundraiser as well, which was super-nice of him.
Q: Some of your panels, especially toward the end, have a lot of people in them. Do those scenes give you nightmares?
A: Oh, yes. Especially because I’m referencing everything. That opening scene when he’s buying the mule in Pricetown was nightmarish to draw. I had to draw an entire town full of people. Then the last issue is one long fight scene with as many people as I could draw in every panel as possible. Men, women and children. It took me a long time to draw that last issue. Probably took me about three times longer than it should have.
Q: How long does a typical issue take you?
A: Ideally they’re supposed to be taking about four to six weeks per issue. That one took probably about three months. Just because of all the referencing and trying to make that fight scene flow across twenty-two pages and changing locations—he’s running through the town—and having that all make sense. The little things I had to communicate, like when he goes through the barbershop and throws the pot of boiling water at people as they’re coming after him. It’s a pot of boiling water full of razors that are being disinfected. To communicate all of that in two panels is difficult. I didn’t have a lot of space to do it and I’d kind of painted myself into a corner with this “I’m going to do everything wide-screen.” I was limiting the number of panels I could draw. It took a lot of work. I spent a lot of time on that last issue.
Q: Do you have a favorite scene or panel?
A: For the better part of a year I got to pretend I was Sergio Leone directing Clint Eastwood. I love the parts where he’s just walking and thinking, the traveling parts of it. I could do those big landscapes. I really like the scene at the end of the first issue where he and Allie were in bed for the first time and Sheb is coming up the stairs. I thought that part really worked out nice. My favorite part, though, by far is the scene where Allie is telling the story of Nort. Not when the man in black comes but how Nort became addicted to the weed. I really liked that section. I liked the section with the man in black, too. I loved that whole series. Those five issues were nothing but a pleasure.
Q: How much interaction did you have with Richard Isanove during this process?
A: Richard’s great. He’s a pro. I felt like Richard defined the visual look of the series because he’s been the one consistent thing throughout. At first it was tough to get used to his style because he’s rendering so much more than most colorists do. Richard brings so much more to the plate, and it took a little bit to get used to. At first I think I offended him with asking him to tone it down a little bit. Once I got used to what he was doing, though, it was fun to see what we could do to push him here and there and to leave things for him to take care of. Like I said, to the point where, the last cover, I just penciled it and let Richard do his thing. And it was great. I wish I had just penciled the whole thing now—no offense to my inker, who’s fantastic. I think it would have been interesting to see the results of that.
Q: How is your process different when you’re doing a cover versus the interior?
A: Covers are a completely different beast. I am much more comfortable telling a story. Covers are more about design and grabbing people’s attention off the shelves. This series, because it’s a little more sophisticated than your typical comic book, it was a little easier for my sensibilities to do the covers—not that I’m such a sophisticated guy—but they didn’t have to be jumping off the page and loud and in your face like a lot of comic book covers have to be. So I was able to settle back and find representative images to draw. At that point it was just a matter of finding a cool angle or something like that. The man in black was fun. Everybody was like, oh, his eyes are so scary. And I was like, “Those are my eyes!”
I was really proud of those covers. I’m not a great cover artist and those were just fun covers to draw. That last one, I think I did three, maybe four versions, because we threw several things at the wall to see what would stick. The editors were fine with what I was doing, but I kept rejecting it until we finally hit on that one. There’s an image like that at the end of the fourth issue, where he’s walking through town and nobody’s there, which is such a classic Western scene. The shutters banging in the wind. The deserted town. I knew I wanted to do that close-up of him pushing his jacket back so he can get easy access to his gun because he’s sensing trouble. As soon as I drew that image in the issue, I said, “Oh, that’s the cover.” The editors were like, “Yeah, but it needs something extra.” As I started working on the issue and paying attention to him getting wounded, the blood came to me and that became the cover I’m happiest with. I hope they use that one for the trade, but they’ll probably use the first one.
Q: Do you listen to music when you work?
A: I had a four-hour playlist of Ennio Morricone Western movie soundtrack music that I listened to the entire time. That stuff is cool anyway. I listened to a lot of soundtrack music while I was working on it. I ended up listening to some action movie soundtracks while I was working on the last issue.
Q: Do you have any thoughts on a movie adaptation of the Dark Tower series?
A: They should hire me to do all the storyboards! I think it will be cool. I’m looking forward to seeing it. It will be interesting to see how somebody else does a film version of these sets that I’ve drawn. Robin told me that they’d shown some of the work I did on Sheb’s honky-tonk to Ron Howard, so we’ll see what they end up doing.
I wish I could say that I’m a big Dark Tower geek, but unfortunately I’m not. I’m a big Stephen King fan, but those are ones that I had not gotten into at the time we started doing this. I like the first one because it’s more like his older, more minimal style than the other ones. My favorite stuff of his is ’Salem’s Lot and Carrie and The Shining. When they came out, they must have knocked people’s socks off. People must not have ever seen anything like that. I get the impression that they’re all very personal to him. I really like that about them. I felt that stylistically, The Gunslinger was similar to those in writing style. The Shining is one of my favorite books of all time. That’s just a great novel, period. Forget horror novel. Forget genres. That’s just a great novel.
STEFANO GAUDIANO
Stefano Gaudiano, who inked The Battle of Tull, was born in Milan and lived in Rome until his first year of high school, at which time he moved to the United States. He has no formal art training, describing himself as self-taught. He was introduced to Marvel comics while he was still living in Italy. When he noticed the credits at the beginning of the issues, he realized that people actually drew them—a machine didn’t produce them. He was a huge fan of Stan Lee’s superhero creations and the atmosphere of communication between the creators and the fans. He started copying pictures out of the comics and decided by the time he was eleven or twelve that drawing comics was what he wanted to do for a living.
He started self-publishing comics in the 1980s, after he moved to the United States. His first paid work was on a book called Kafka for Renegade Press. A string of small jobs led him to work for bigger publishers and his childhood dream became reality. Being an inker has given him the opportunity to work on a wide variety of characters, including Batman, Daredevil, Spider-Man, the Mighty Thor, Iron Man, Captain America. As a freelance artist, he also does newspaper illustrations and storyboards for animation and video games.
The following interview was conducted via telephone in October 2011.
Q: How do you describe the job of the inker?
A: The inker is usually either an artist or an apprentice, somebody who, instead of penciling—drawing a whole book from a script or writing and drawing his own book—is assisting another artist to finish the drawings. Originally it was a necessary step for printing because the technology was such that you couldn’t reproduce pencil work. Everything had to be done in clean lines that could be reproduced through metal engravings. Inking was developed to turn sketches into something very clean and crisp that the printer could reproduce.
Now the job of an inker is almost redundant because there are techniques that will allow art to be reproduced from pencil. But Michael Lark, who is the penciler that I worked with on Dark Tower and also my main collaborator on other books for Marvel and DC, likes to work with me because it frees him up to do a little bit more of the design work on the content. He leaves the pencils finished enough that I can tell what he wants, but he saves himself some work by passing the unfinished drawings on to me so that I can add textures, fill in the blacks and clean things up a little bit. It’s his choice to work with me to save himself some work on the back end and be able to do a little bit more of the heavy lifting creatively at the outset.
I find inking to be a lot more manageable ever since I had children. It’s the sort of job that I can put aside and get back to without having to go through the process of getting back into the creative mode. Some people have an easier time penciling. I was talking to Sean Philips, who did one of the arcs, too, and he’s amazing. He can pencil and ink books and he’s got a family but somehow he manages to keep his head clear and get all of his work done and it seems to be something that he can handle. I found after I had children that I just could not snap in and out of the drawing mind-set easily at all, so ever since then I’ve done mostly inks.
Q: Does he send you an electronic image, or do you get a physical pencil sketch?
A: I used to get physical pencil sketches, but ever since I started working with Michael I’ve been working from just JPGs. I turn them into blue lines and print them out. Then I ink in black and when I scan them, the blue disappears and we’re just left with the black lines. It’s a great system because it allows me to make little changes that I need to make and it saves me time erasing and cleaning up the pages. After I’ve scanned the inks, I send them to Marvel and Richard Isanove colors them and they get lettered and that’s a book.
Q: Were you familiar with the Dark Tower series before you started working on The Battle of Tull?
A: No, I wasn’t. I was of course aware of Stephen King’s work but haven’t read a lot of his work. I wasn’t familiar at all with the Dark Tower series, so I got The Gunslinger book that the episode we illustrated was taken from and read that, but that was the extent of my awareness of it.
Q: Do you have any favorite scenes from The Battle of Tull?
A: I love the whole part of the first book that shows Roland approaching Tull. It’s got a great spaghetti Western feel, going through the desert. It’s a great atmosphere. I was listening to Sergio Leone movie soundtracks while I was working on the books. Michael did a great job cinematically introducing the sets.
I also enjoyed the scenes of Roland on the mule going through the desert. Richard did a great job on the very last page, creating that atmosphere of moonlight as Roland rides off into the desert with Tull in the distance. That was probably my favorite stuff to work on and visually I think it worked beautifully.
One that gave me a lot of problems—almost made it difficult to finish the book—was a horrible scene where Roland confronts Sylvia Pittston in her shack. That was brutal. I thought the scene was very powerful and I love what Michael did with it, but it was almost inexplicable to me. I was going through the motions of finishing the art and feeling really uncomfortable with the whole thing. In spite of those negative feelings, that scene with Sylvia Pittston stuck out in my mind as one of the best scenes.
Something that added heaviness to Roland’s interaction with Sylvia Pittston is that Michael uses models for some of the characters, and the model that he used was a big fan of the series. But she was diagnosed with cancer while she was working on the book with Michael and that added the pall of heaviness on the series as we finished it up.
I’m not familiar with the Dark Tower series as a whole. After drawing that scene, I just couldn’t understand Roland’s motivations and the nature of Roland’s character. It made it difficult when we got to the end, the massacre at Tull. I couldn’t see Roland in any kind of positive light. I’d be curious to see what the character arc is going to work out like. There’s obviously more to Roland than what I got to see, so I’m looking forward to exploring that eventually as a reader.
Laurence Campbell, artist for The Way Station, started working in graphic design in London at the age of sixteen, before studying illustration at Central Saint Martin’s Art College. He continued to tutor at the college for the next decade while drawing comics in his spare time, including work for 2000 AD, a British weekly comic, and Caliber and Image comics. He joined Marvel in 2006. Before working on Roland, he drew other dark, moody characters like the Punisher, Wolverine and Moon Knight.
The following interview was conducted via e-mail in October 2011.
Q: What is your history with King’s Dark Tower series?
A: Marvel approached me about drawing an arc of the Dark Tower as I was finishing Marvel Universe vs. Wolverine. I was very excited about this as I had a paperback copy of The Gunslinger from years ago and the opportunity to work on the Stephen King graphic novels was something I was very much interested in. I can still remember picking up the book and being very excited by the idea of a cowboy in a fantasy setting. I remember the cover pulling me in. I also remember my friend basing his Dungeons & Dragons character on the gunslinger! I now own all the graphic novels and have really enjoyed them. I’ve not read any of King’s other books, though the TV adaptation of ’Salem’s Lot scared the hell out of me when I was a kid and I still get a chill when I hear tapping on the window.
Q: What are you doing for The Way Station?
A: I’m doing pencils, covers and inks. I’m very excited to be working with Richard. I think his coloring is amazing. In my opinion, he is an essential part of the book. Before starting my arc on The Way Station, I was looking at the other artists who I was going to follow and felt that Sean Phillips and Michael Lark brought a real cowboy essence to the book while Jae Lee, I felt, brought a more fantasy iconic look to the book. I have tried to find a balance between the two styles. It is very flattering to be part of a project with such established artists. I’m loving the way the story has been planned out and am really enjoying the art. It really is a great package.
Q: Do you know how you were selected for The Way Station?
A: Ralph Macchio (the editor of the Dark Tower series) was my editor for Marvel Universe vs. Wolverine. I was offered the opportunity to draw the arc as I was coming to the end of my previous strip. I pretty much jumped at the chance.
Q: How much are you influenced by the depictions of the characters created by other artists?
A: I bought all the trade paperbacks and then researched and found reference to get the feel of the story right. Obviously you have to respect how other artists have drawn the characters. Generally, though, I am just drawing what I feel is right for the story. I think a lot of credit goes to the editors who have picked all of the artists, as I think there is a line of similarity between all of us.
Q: How did you approach Jake Chambers, whom you debuted in the graphic novels?
A: When I first read the script, I found Jake Chambers’s backstory very touching. I felt that while I wanted to read it, a part of me didn’t want to, as it gets pretty dark. I’ve just tried to make Jake an innocent-looking boy. At this moment I am drawing the point where Jake first appears.
Q: What is your process after you receive the script?
A: The script I’ve been given is not a full script, more of an old “Marvel style” script, which just gives directions. At first I found this a surprise and a challenge. But now I really enjoy it as I get the chance to pace the book for myself. Because the story is adapted from a book, it does give you the opportunity to be a little bit experimental with page layouts but not to the detriment of the storytelling—that must always come first.
You don’t get too much time when drawing the comic, but you do have to spend time planning and working out layouts, costumes, etc. The more time I spend on this in the beginning, the more time is saved later on, and getting ideas down on paper can confirm thoughts in my head. I’m only on issue one at the moment, but have enjoyed drawing the open scenes of the desert. I also enjoyed Roland fighting the desert dogs.
Q: How much do you interact with Richard Isanove during the creative process?
A: When I send him the pages, I send him my thoughts of how I see the scene and possible color ideas. However, the final product is down to Richard and I have total faith in him. I purposely made the artwork more spacious on The Dark Tower because I think this works to Richard’s strengths.
Q: How much do you interact with Robin Furth during the process?
A: I have e-mail contact with Robin and send the artwork to her to be approved. She always has a great knowledge of the Dark Tower, and when I have any questions, she’s been incredibly helpful.
Q: Are you at all influenced by The Punisher in the way you approach Roland?
A: There is a certain mood and presence that The Punisher has that I guess can be seen in Roland, though maybe not as dark. Just to add, I’m really excited about drawing the strip. It’s an honor to be part of the team.