The Dark Tower Companion: A Guide to Stephen King’s Epic Fantasy (42 page)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!”