If you’re still reading this, Peter David is still butchering the original, or rather rebutchering it by adding his own wacky ideas. The girl gunslinger doesn’t make another appearance, but we do get a drawn out lead in to the fifth issue. Roland is still in a haze thanks to the wacky red ball of doom. After umpteen issues, I could count how many but I kind of like my sanity where it is, Roland finally gives up the grapefruit of doom to his father, but not before seeing yet more visions of his father’s death. That’s something Marten has taken care of by using Roland’s mother as a catspaw for the murder scheme. Marten also knows about the grapefruit and has plans for it too. It’s also implied that a spy is feeding false information about Farson’s movements to the forces of Gilead, and that Farson’s men have vastly expanded their range and are moving across the border. This would seem to bring the apocalyptic battle where Alain and the gang buy it that much closer to home. Of course not a whole lot happens in Treachery 4, another weak and belabored entry from Peter David who seems to be dragging this out like a bad cough. Things do however begin to pick up in Issue 5.

The Dark Tower Treachery issue 3 is a long way from what it should be, but it is a more workable issue than the positive embarrassments that were Treachery Issue 1 and Issue 2. Issue 3 is certainly not great, but it does actually get back to dealing with the Dark Tower backstory and tries to tie in the disparate storylines underway with the return of Steven Deschain and the adult Gunslingers and Roland seeing Rhea’s plot against his father while Marten continues his seduction of Gabrielle, Roland’s mother and Steven’s wife.

There is yet another unnecessary scene of Cuthbert and Alain once again talking about Roland’s problem and the cheating issue. This is the third time in three issues that we get an exposition scene like this and it’s fantastically unnecessary and goes nowhere. I’m sure it will eventually but in issue after issue it’s nothing more than dead space. And that makes it abysmal plotting. Aileen Ritter (not giving characters in the same story too similar names is something downright basic) does make another shorter and somewhat less annoying appearance after her Poochyesque debut in Issue 2.

But there is real meat to Issue 3, namely Gabrielle’s exile to a nunnery, Marten’s seduction of her there and Roland’s addiction tying in to the larger plot against Steven, Roland and the Gunslingers. Roland sees Rhea heading to Gilead, sneaking up on his father and killing him. Of course considering that we know how Gabrielle dies, it’s likely that this is an illusion to trick Roland into killing his own mother, an ugly turn of events and a way for Marten or the Man in Black to accomplish what he first set out to do, cause Roland to be driven out of Gilead.

While I’m not a big fan of South Park and I thought the Indiana Jones rape episode was over the top and not that funny, there is something to that sense of walking into a theater or sitting down with a book or a comic from a series you have great expectations for, only to see the pants come down. And yes The Gunslinger Born series has just about reached that point now, especially since actual pants do come down in Treachery Issue 2.

In my review of Treachery 1 I complained about the boys’ adventure feel of the whole thing, the lack of seriousness and purpose, and the dethroning of Roland. Well Treachery 2 tops all of these with no actual appearance by Roland, instead we get a girl gunfighter. Aileen Ritter, Cort’s niece. Now there’s nothing wrong with the idea of a female gunslinger, obviously that was a major part of The Dark Tower. But there is something wrong in introducing a character, Clone Wars style, having her outdo the Gunslingers without ever having handled a gun before, and giving the whole thing a Girl Power spin that can only inspire retching.

Treachery 2’s limited redeeming value comes from continuing the story of the ambush of the adult Gunslingers through Justin’s treachery at the behest of Farson, but that just serves to emphasize how juvenile the characters who are supposed to be at the center of the story are by contrast. So to sum up, by Issue 2 of Treachery, Roland is drugged by the Grapefruit and MIA and Peter David has instead thrown a heaping lump of girl power on the table in the best Clone Wars style.

After the tepid issues of The Way Home, Treachery was Peter David’s chance to prove that the weak story and poor pacing of The Way Home were growing pains for his first real outing on his own in Stephen King’s world. Unfortunately The Dark Tower Treachery Issue 1 doesn’t bring much in the way of change. The pacing problems continue, much of Issue 1 is actually taken up by Alain and Cuthbert’s encounter with a group of fellow Gunslingers in training who resent their rapid elevation without test or trial.

The bigger problem for Treachery Issue 1 though is similar to what haunted The Way Home. First we have a weak and inept Roland. Now Roland through the original Dark Tower and even as a young man in Wizard and Glass was many things, but weak and aimless weren’t on the list, not even when the series itself was at its weakest. Roland’s desperate measured strength is a large ingredient in what made the series work.

And then there’s the tone. Wizard and Glass was an adult story about the chronologically young, but aged by their challenges. The Way Home and Treachery 1 are kids’ stories. Sure there is blood and killing, but anyone can splatter some gore around, it’s the attitude and the seriousness that counts, and Treachery 1 smacks of the same inept characters and the condescending narrative of boy’s adventure stories we saw in The Way Home. If Treachery’s future issues are not to go down the same road, the series will have to genuinely grow up. This isn’t Static Shock. This is The Dark Tower.

Dark Tower The Long Road Home #5 finally snaps out of the daze that the last three issues have malingered in to actually advance the story. From a confrontation between Roland and the Crimson King in which the King attempts to offer Roland the chance to rule along with him in a universe of chaos in which the Dark Tower has been destroyed, Sheemie arrives along with superpowers to interrupt the party and give Roland a chance to escape.

The whole Sheemie thing is a long way from credible, considering that Sheemie just got a power and brain boost supposedly, yet he’s suddenly ready to take on the Crimson King. But anything that puts an end to the whole Nightmare on Roland Street tale that consumed most of The Dark Tower The Long Road Home really, really cannot be all bad. Even if it involves a retarded kid with special powers taking on the closest thing the Mid-World universe has to a devil. Considering a retarded kid winds up erasing the Crimson King entirely, a retarded kid who’s placed in the story by Stephen King in person, well SuperSheemie begins looking good by comparison.

Dark Tower The Long Road Home #5 picks up finally as the Gunslingers make it to Gilead where flags are flying at half staff in mourning for their deaths, word of which was spread by Farson’s men. Roland who has been watching the grapefruit keeps it close to himself without telling his father of it. It’s the best material in all of The Long Road Home and a reminder of what a dreary waste the last three issues have been and a hope that Peter David does a better job of laying out the plot so one issue’s worth of story doesn’t have to drag on for 4.5 issues.

Dark Tower The Long Road Home #4 drags Roland’s Marten inflicted dreamwalk or physical transport to Thunderclap to a point as Roland is taken to the castle of the Crimson King, a fellow who seemed a good deal more impressive back in Insomnia than he was at the end of the Dark Tower when he had no form of defense except a bunch of hand grenades and got erased by an autistic kid. Well considering Stephen King’s fondness for retarded and autistic children, it’s not too surprising that Sheemie shows up in the role of savior, purifying a wound with his powers and then riding into the grapefruit on a mule to save Roland. Well okay it’s surprising, in a jump the shark sort of way. But it’s hard to say whether something can jump the shark when it was never airborne to begin with.

As I’ve said confronting Roland with the Crimson King finally brings some sort of point to three issues that consisted of little but riding and hallucinations and conversations with Marten as a crow. Of course it’s another case of too much too soon, as meeting Farson or confronting Marten in person would have made a good deal more sense than taking a shortcut to the Crimson King who is supposed to be the baddie of baddies and the force behind the assault on Gilead. The confrontation itself is fairly generic, threats of horrible death and all that sort of thing. The art is good, but the script is still badly lacking.

By way of comparison in 4 issues The Gunslinger Born had shown Roland’s test of manhood, mission away from Gilead, arrival in the Barony and the beginnings of his doomed love affair with Susan combined with a look at the evil machinery behind the scenes of it all. By comparison in 4 issues The Long Road Home has shown a lot of riding, a lot of hallucinating and nothing of substance. It took 2 issues for Sheemie to show up, though oddly enough the Dogan has given him powers for good. Mainly in 4 issues Roland has hallucinated a whole lot. From a strong beginning in the beginning of The Long Road Home 1, Peter David has simply imploded and Robin Furth’s mythological sketches are the only real item of interest in these issues.

Dark Tower The Long Road Home #3 picks up where #2 left off with Roland trapped in Marten’s version of Nightmare of Thunderclap Street while his Ka Tet attempt to save him, as Alain enters his nightmare. I don’t think anyone who had gone through The Gunslinger Born expected that the followup would turn into A Nightmare on Elm Street, but that’s pretty much what you get with Marten as Freddie Kruger transforming himself into a crow and a giant crow and shooting energy beams out of his eyes. It’s all about as exciting as you would expect, which means not very.

To those keeping score, The Dark Tower is Roland’s story and yet for the first three issues of The Long Road Home, Roland has been in a hallucinatory dreamworld and by the end of Dark Tower The Long Road Home #3 wakes up as some sort of evil powered zombie. It’s hard not to get the idea that Peter David doesn’t quite get the whole concept of Roland as the hard man’s hard man. That’s confusing because Peter David has plenty of experience writing characters who are driven and all but unstoppable. Unsurprisingly three issues of Roland in a coma isn’t delivering.

By the end of Dark Tower The Long Road Home #3 the horses are dead, Roland is a zombie and zombie wolves with red glowing eyes are stalking them. It might have been cooler if we hadn’t waited through three issues to get anywhere, with the big finish presumably coming from RoboSheemie, a retard with superpowers. Why do I lack confidence in where this is going? In either case the majority of The Long Road Home is done and somehow what should have taken a single issue has been stretched to three. Hopefully the road gets better from here.

Dark Tower The Long Road Home #2 begins with a rather odd and poorly disguised rant about the War in Iraq and one that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense considering that Sheemie is being experimented on by the allies of the forces determined to wipe out all life and transform everything into chaos so demons can take over, which is a long way from hypothetical kids having bombs dropped on them to “improve their lot in life”. Regardless of the validity of the criticism, it’s a pretty silly analogy, but what’s the use of scripting comics, if you can’t pour out everything you learned from the Christian Science Monitor into a completely inappropriate context.

In either case back in The Long Road Home #1, Sheemie had stumbled into a Dogan while following the Big Coffin Hunters after the death of Susan Delgado. Meanwhile the rest of the Ka Tet are running for their lives from a lynch mob of the townsfolk while Roland who shot the grapefruit sphere (but not the deputy sphere) which turned into a giant eye and attacked him, is having hallucinations inflicted by Marten, his first real confrontation with Marten taking place in an imaginary or real Thunderclap.

Like The Long Road Home #1, the bulk of The Long Road Home #2 is dedicated to the escape from the posse, interspersed with Roland’s hallucinations. The whole thing is framed by Sheemie being turned into some sort of half cybernetic killing machine that glows all over in the Dogan. With Issue 2 of The Long Road Home being little distinguishable from The Long Road Home 1, aside from being a lot less interesting, it’s not a great sign for Peter David’s ability to write The Dark Tower on his own. By contrast Robin Furth’s background on the Dogan and Arthur Eid is a good deal more interesting than anything in the actual narrative. By taking Roland out of the action at a critical moment and trying to make his transformation occur via visions, rather than by facing Susan’s murder head on, Peter David has made a fundamental mistake in storytelling.

After a long wait, The Dark Tower comic book series returns and with Peter David at the helm, Robin Furth pulling it all together, Jae Lee doing the art and Stephen King doing whatever he does behind the scenes, The Long Road Issue 1 is out of the gate and here. The Long Road #1 is significant because unlike The Gunslinger Born, it gives the series the chance to break some genuinely new ground and tell some new stories.

The Long Road Home Issue 1 though is more of a quarter story than a story, it begins promisingly enough with Roland standing over Susan’s gruesomely charred body while recollecting their love, at once a powerful and disturbing image, but quickly shifts over as Roland shoots Maerlyn’s grapefruit which becomes a predatory eyeball thing that shoots out and seizes Roland’s consciousness and imprisons it inside, while it torments Roland with nightmares.

Meanwhile a town posse from the Barony led by the last surviving Big Coffin Hunter is coming for the surviving boys and with Roland out of action, the rest try to escape only to wind up stuck against a waterfall. Behind the posse meanwhile Sheemie, the retarded kid, stumbles on a Dogan, which was apparently an old army base with cyborgs and revives one, which will no doubt be a factor in the next issue. We also learn that the cyborgs killed Arthur of Eid, in the Robin Furth backstory, which also feels fairly weak.

For six issues the final showdown of the first arc of the Gunslinger Born has been building and in the seventh issue events crash down to their epic conclusion. The epic scale of the story can be seen in the number of double page panels that the seventh issue boasts. The story of Roland’s love for Susan Delgado was always a doomed tale, whether as it was told originally in a flashback by Roland in Book Four of the Dark Tower saga, Wizard and Glass or in the first arc of The Gunslinger Born comic book series.

What Gunslinger Born did was give Susan more of an identity and more backbone and courage, making her almost an equal partner with the rest of Roland’s Ka-Tet in some ways. Despite featuring her death, Issue 7 of Gunslinger does not spend much time lingering over it. One panel shows her burning at the Charyou Tree and three pages show her capture by the Big Coffin Hunters and her defiance of them. Gunslinger #7 handles it all far better than Wizard and Glass does displaying the naturalistic way the townspeople choose to carry out her murder. The panel featuring Susan’s death though is overwrought to the point of hysteria mixing bad art, a garishly colored Susan, bad lettering, a garish word bubble and bad writing. Susan’s burning is a difficult scene to manage a similar scene of a young girl being burned at the stake was handled with much more discretion by Tales of the Slayers where understating what was happening increased its impact.

Gunslinger #7 - Issue 7 of Stephen King’sThe Gunslinger Born

Susan Delgado in Wizard and Glass was in many ways more object than subject, a female character who as too many female characters in fantasy novels are, was disposable. Her death was written before the story began and her role was in many ways an obstruction in Roland’s life, a plot point to be ticked off and swept out of the way. Stephen King had written memorable and strong female characters before but Susan Delgado was not one of them. In many ways the first arc of Gunslinger Born helps repair that by doing a far better job of giving Susan her own voice and her own mind.

Issue VI of Gunslinger is easily the best at telling Susan’s story and from the opening that has Cuthbert riding along and thinking of his argument with Roland over Susan and intercepting a note about Susan via Sheemie and to its closing moments as Rhea and Roy discuss their sight of Susan in Maerlyn’s Grapefruit, even when Susan is not in the scene, she is usually the topic. While the inevitability of her tragic fate cannot be changed, as signaled by the closing material of Gunslinger Issue 6, she can and is being given a proper sendoff as a heroine in her own right rather than just a bland girl in the wrong place at the wrong time, as she often appeared in Wizard and Glass.

Gunslinger #6 The First Gunslinger Born Arc Approaches Its Close

Whether among the darkness and the dark things that hover around the world where darkness is mixed with light or in the world itself with its crazed mixture of laughter and life, sorrow and death, Ka is the wheel on which the fates of men are spun like so much silken thread and on which they are in turn broken. The thread of Roland winds its way across the loom ever closer to the Dark Tower, slipping out and falling away and yet always shooting forward.

For a time the threads of other lives, sometimes that of his Ka-Tet, those chosen to stand together with him as one group and fight together, whether they be Eddie and Susanah of New York, Jake and Oy the bumbler or the companions of his past like Alain or the love of his past, Susan. Susan Delgado, chosen concubine of Mayor Thorin, servant of Farson, the Good Man, whose armies in service to the Great Dark draw closer to the realm of Gilead, realm of Arthur Eid, the first Gunslinger who brought unity to the Baronies against the bandit raiders who terrorized the world after the Old People destroyed themselves.

Gunslinger #5 - The Fifth Issue of The Gunslinger Born

With the fourth issue of The Gunslinger Born, Roland and his Ka-Tet of apprentice gunslingers find themselves deeper in the intrigue roiling through the town of Hambry. Roland all the while falls in love with Susan Delgado and forms an alliance to destroy Farson’s forces coming for the oil of Hambry which they need to power their legions of tanks and war machines.

Like The Gunslinger Born Issue #3, Gunslinger Born Issue #4 is dedicated in part to rehashing in grand visual style some scenes we already saw in Stephen King’s fourth novel in the Dark Tower saga, Wizard and Glass. Yet Jae Lee’s art captures the romance of Roland and Susan as jagged windblown shapes, stolen glances and moments amidst the whirlwind that is soon to come. The result is a far more eloquent tale than had been rendered all throughout the rather mediocre Wizard and Glass, told in the succeeding panels of furtive touches, glances and kisses, the handful of bright moments before the coming doom. It is also an area where Stephen King’s original style dominates the atmosphere without choking the story. At its best the iconic imagery is captured in the full page panel below that shows Roland as Wil Dearborn and Susan together, overshadowed by the rusted metal chain, the bonds of life, duty, destiny and Ka Tet that both link them and yet ultimately tear them apart.

Gunslinger #4 - The Fourth Issue of The Gunslinger Born

For the most part– more so than Gunslinger Born Issue Two– Three Gunslinger Born Issue Three, covers ground that had already been covered in Wizard and Glass. Roland’s first meeting with Susan, the arrival of Roland, Cuthbert and Alain to the Mayor’s house and the confrontation with the Big Coffin Hunters were all featured in The “Dark Tower: Wizard and Glass”. However Jae Lee’s artwork reduces scenes to their elemental natures, revealing and concealing in cinematic flashes, the shadowed outline of Roland and Susan first meeting in the darkness– as seen in the opening page below– the glint of expression in Susan’s eye or in Roland’s as they meet again and Roland sees what her life is and he learns what hers is, the tense Mexican standoff that develops between Roland, Cuthbert, Alain and the Big Coffin Hunters rendered in “The Good, The Bad and The Ugly” classic Western Sergio Leone frames and angles.

And then there is the background– our first view of Farson, who has remained an ominous off screen presence throughout the Dark Tower saga and unlike The Crimson King, never made even a belated last minute appearance. (Though considering how disappointing and anti-climactic the Crimson King’s appearance was, as an old man throwing grenades, that really is not saying very much.) According to the brief sketchbook in the back of Issue 3, Jae Lee attempted two versions of the Farson scene and discarded the first one that showed a thick and burly Farson, as opposed to the second final version that shows Farson as bloody and gaunt. Arguably Jae Lee’s first rendering of Farson was superior– but we take what we can get.

Gunslinger #3 - Stephen King’s The Dark Tower - The Gunslinger Born Three

The Affiliation exists in the shadow of the war Maerlyn brought about, which nearly destroyed the Tower and the realm of the Imperium as well as opening ‘Thinnies’, gateways for creatures from the void, the prim, to enter human worlds and wreak havoc there. The Crimson King is himself a product of Maerlyn’s assault on the realm of Gilead when it was young and Arthur Eid was its newly crowned king. Maerlyn brought The Crimson Queen, a demoness, to seduce Arthur Eid. Like Roland’s own son by a demoness, Mordred– the result is an inhuman manspider creature of pure evil.

Like Sauron giving the Rings of Power to elves, dwarves and mortal men, Maerlyn — greatest of all the creatures of the void– crafted these thirteen spheres to form a rainbow. The spheres possess various powers, but like the Rings of Power, they ultimately warp whoever possesses them. Maerlyn had already wrought the fall of the first human civilization and now he plots to bring the second one down as well. With the work of the Crimson King, Arthur Eid’s damned descendant and through the hand of his servant, Marten– against them must rise to stand Roland of the line of Eid.

Gunslinger 2 Issue : Stephen King’s Dark Tower - The Gunslinger Born

Stephen King

“While Stephen King began writing in small markets and the original Gunslinger novel, serialized in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, he is best known for his more general horror writing. The Dark Tower series attempts to do what many successful Fantasy and Science Fiction writers have done, which is to tie in all their writing into a single metaverse. Robert Heinlein began it with his Future History and for Stephen King, The Dark Tower serves not only as the linchpin of the tale, but as the core element uniting all the worlds he has written about. So much so, that in a rather controversial move, Stephen King wrote himself into the narrative of the final novels as Stephen King, the creator of the novels. The result seemed to foreshadow the surrealistically circular nature of the final conclusion.

Except it was not the final conclusion. Back when Stephen King had been severely injured after being struck by a van on the shoulder of the road and was recovering in severe pain, he announced that he would be giving up his writing career once he finished the Dark Tower novels. Stephen King has shown no sign of actually giving up his writing career even after finishing the novels, but what he has done is signaled his desire to rewrite them altogether. In a sense the limited run of the Gunslinger comic book series begins the process, returning to before the world of “Wizard and Glass”, to Roland growing up from a boy into a man.”

Gunslinger #1: Stephen King’s Dark Tower Reborn