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Dark Tower Comic Series Confirmed
uberbastard writes "For all of you die-hard fans of Stephen King's epic Dark Tower series, it looks like we're in for an extension. Stephen King and Marvel comics will be teaming up along with renowned artist Jae Lee to create an original comic series based on The Dark Tower. From the article: 'The comics will work in conjunction with the novels, further supplementing and defining the saga's mythology under the direction of the acclaimed author himself.'"
For the most part I hope that Stephen King is doing this by his own volition, a desire to expand his genre to the more visual aspects.
His writings are a guilty pleasure and will not last long after his death. I remember reading his short story "The Body"(the movie stand by me was based on this). He took four freaking pages to describe the damn body.
I just mean in the "suspension of disbelief" kinda way. In the first book, we discover that physics of Mid-World is the same as our universe. We discover that magic exists in Mid-world. We discover that there are doors between universes when we meet Jake. We discover that there are mutants (which explains other bizarre animals in later books). We know time doesn't quite make sense any more. We learn alot.
I can't think of any concrete examples at this time (it's been over a year since I re-read from the beginning -- and almost 10 years since I read Gunslinger -- and almost 6 months since I finished the last book), but I know I had some "WTF" moments where it seemed like things were just made up on-the-fly (and I don't think S.K. would disagree, since he claims to write books as-they-come, not with a pre-planned plot).
I'm not arguing about it's ability to exist in that universe, just that it's nice if it's introduced from the get go instead of 1/2 way through the story. But seeing that the story was written over decades, unplanned, I can't expect anything more.
Don't get me wrong. It's my favorite series of books (and as a whole, my favorite story), beating out The Vampire Chronicles by a good margin.
You're right, we shouldn't expect all the answers.
However, with regard to the Dark Tower, there's a pretty clear (and pretty unfortunate) division between books 1-4 and the rest: the pre-accident and post-accident era. King's near-death experience profoundly affected him (heck, the fact that he writes the guy who hit him into the story--a guy who, you'll remember, killed himself not too long after the event in question--is testament to that by itself), and frankly, I think his writing suffered in the aftermath. A few people theorized that part of the problem is that his editors "went easy" on him afterwards, and that he was rushing to complete the series "just in case."
I agree with the grandparent that the series ended on a slow, disappointing note. No, I didn't expect everything to be explained. What I did expect, however, was storytelling that made up for the lack of clear explanations. Books 1-4 had this in spades. 5-7? Exposition, exposition, exposition. The characters are no longer "effortlessly" the characters we got used to; instead, they're almost forced in mannerisms and attitudes. Et cetera.
They weren't bad, but they weren't great, and as one who thinks that Stephen King is a profoundly underrated author (yes, yes, he's popular, but I think he has a grasp of literary technique that he is rarely acknowledged as posessing) I expected more.