The Dark Tower Companion: A Guide to Stephen King’s Epic Fantasy (41 page)
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Authors: Bev Vincent
Q:Â Â Â Do you have color themes for characters or settings?
A:Â Â Â 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:Â Â Â The layout for the Dark Tower graphic novels is more basic than some of the contemporary graphic novels.
A:Â Â Â 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:Â Â Â How much do you interact with the pencil artists during this process?
A:Â Â Â 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:Â Â Â What was your favorite section to work on?
A:Â Â Â 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”âwhich 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:Â Â Â 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 winâand, 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:Â Â Â Do you have favorite characters?
A:Â Â Â 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 partâmy 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.