Marvel.com has erected its own mini—site for the seven—part miniseries, which promises to be a mixture of an adaptation of novel Wizard and Glass and original material about the Dark Tower protagonist.
At the site you'll find a movie—style trailer and a countdown clock counting the seconds backward until the first issue's release, which fell at an out of the ordinary hour.
New comic books are always released and sold on Wednesdays, but Dark Tower kept some shop—owners up late on Tuesday night. It got a midnight release, with about 150 shops in the U.S. selling it the minute the clock struck 12. While this happens all the time with franchise movies with built—in fan bases (your Star Wars, Lord of the Rings and Matrix movies), and in publishing with big books like the Harry Potter series, it's unprecedented for a funny book. (Hell, do Stephen King novels even earn midnight releases anymore?)
The talking up of the project's awesomeness is even louder in the book itself. In his afterword to the story, Marvel editor Ralph Macchio speaks about the project in a tone so reverent you'd almost believe the comic book will cure the diseases of all who read it.
Macchio refers to "the magazine you're holding" (this is a comic book that's far too good for the word "comic book," clearly), he thanks King's agent by name (and just about everyone else involved), he gushes that working on the project was "magic!" and he refers to a meeting with King thusly: "Imagine being in a meeting with the Master Storyteller of the age."
Having read the first issue, I can't report that the experience was "magical!" or even worth a late—night trip to the comic shop, but it is a solid bit of comics craftsmanship, and should prove pleasing enough to both hardcore King fans and curious comics readers who want to know what all the noise is about.
First, a caveat—King doesn't actually write the script for this particular comic book, although he does get top billing, and the nature of his exact creative input is vague (beyond, you know, creating the story in prose). He's credited simply as the "creative director and executive director."
Second billing goes to Dark Tower expert and King research assistant Robin Furth, who wrote Stephen King's The Dark Tower: A Concordance. She's credited with "plotting and consultation."
The actual script—writer, Peter David, gets third billing. Now, David's no slouch at either comics or pot—boiling prose (though none of his potboilers have ever reached Stephen King heat before), and he kicks off the narrated story with the Gunslinger chasing the Man in Black through the desert.
We then flash back to the late boyhood of Roland Deschain and sit in on hawk practice. In short order, we watch Roland become a man and earn the right to become an apprentice gunslinger.
Artists Jae Lee and Richard Isanove are charged with bringing King's world to visual life. Lee's art is beautifully rendered and laid out cinematically, although he's not the greatest "actor" with a pencil (his characters tend to be stiff and emotionless). Lee draws birds of prey and architecture beautifully, though, and his human figures do have a hint of photorealism and a sense of gravity about them. Isanove, a skilled colorist doing some of the best work of his career here, transforms Lee's art, giving the story a wash of brown and golden nostalgia.
While I didn't necessarily appreciate the hard sell, it's hard not to appreciate it as the damn fine comic book that Gunslinger Born is. Whatever time of day you end up reading it.