DARK TOWER LONG ROAD HOME #1 (OF 5)
What did the
iFanboy
community think?
Pulls
Size: pages
Price: 3.99
Let me preface this review by noting that I am a huge fan of the Dark Tower novels and have read them all multiple times. Having said that I have to say The Dark Tower: The Long Road Home and its predecessor before it Gunslinger Born are terrible comics. They are highly produced (some might say over produced) and polished but they fail in some of the basics. The art is highly rendered and no doubt difficult to produce but it appears static rather than dynamic and fails to communicate movement in the story. It is,unfortunately, nothing more than a series of still illustrations and not sequential storytelling art. The second major failure as far as I am concerned it that the writing is just flat out boring. This is like reading the Cliff’s Notes version of an action series. You get an idea of where the drama and tension should happen but just don’t feel it. You can tell Robin Furth wrote the Dark Tower Enclyopedia (or Companion, or Compendum or whatever it was called) because this reads like a painfully dry history textbook. Perhaps because this book is only retreading what we already know from the novels it doesn’t feel as though there is any desperate rush to get where we are going. I feel no urgency or tension in the story. I feel no love for the characters (which is odd because I do love them in the prose medium) I do however feel dumb for buying this issue #1. Don’t be fooled kids, the package is pretty but it is empty and rotten on the inside.
Art: 1 - Poor
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I gotta say, I love Jae Lee’s look, but you do make some sense here. This is a book that I want to like, very much, but can’t quite get behind. Or understand really.
I didn’t think these comics were terrible per se, but I thought that taking a popular epic like the Dark Tower series and putting it into comic form was taking away from some of the greatness. The first series took a 700 page book and condensed it to six 32 page comics. That’s quite a cutback, especially when thinking about some of the major plot points they left out. The first series was simply ok, and caught a majority of the major plot lines. Jae Lee’s art is great but the inks and colors are very overproduced.
I can see how there’s people that love this book, even though they may not have much experience in the Dark Tower Universe. I’ve decided not to buy this next series, but overall numbers can’t really lie: it sells pretty damn well.
Josh man, I’m with you. I really wanted this series to be good and I keep going back to it and trying to re read it until I start liking it but…I just don’t enjoy it. And I’m a little bit sad about that.
Interesting, I liked the previous series, and have bought this issue & plan on purchasing the remainder of the series as well. Maybe it’s because I haven’t read the Dark Tower books (sans The Gunslinger), and don’t really intend to read the rest of the prose series either, at least not in the near future. For me, I like reading Roland’s adventures in bits & pieces, like "The Tale Gray Dick" or "The Little Sisters of Eluria." Yeah, I know these stories take place in a greater framework, but the epic doesn’t interest me so much as specific bits of it (and, Yeah, I know that’s like saying I don’t like cars but carburetors … awesome!)
With the first series, I found Jae Lee’s art fantastic and, to my eye, quite dynamic and, along with Isanove’s painterly colors (which you either love or hate), perfectly invoked the fever-dream atmosphere of a "world that has moved on" that I gleaned from the first novel and my subsequent, albeit limited, exposure to the rest of the Dark Tower universe. And the story/adaptation itself was enjoyable enough, although I did stop reading it half-way through the monthly run to wait until the rest of the issues came out, if only because I found the story a bit too dense to read via installment form. And this follow-up book looks to be a nice continuation of the first series.
I eventually gave my issues away as a birthday present to a friend, who is a huge Stephen King/Dark Tower fan–in fact, she is the only person I know whose read the whole series and wasn’t horribly disappointed with the final book. She and her boyfriend both really enjoyed the comics, both the art and story adaptation. A second-hand report, I know, but it does show some Dark Tower fans find the Marvel adaptations to be just as enthralling as the original.
But at $3.99 an issue, I’m not going to begrudge anyone from buying either series. And if you can do without the bonus material printed in the comic, buy it in hardcover–should be on the shelves by Christmas time.
I think that if you’re looking at this book as if its trying to be a action book, then of course this book is going to appear static and confusing. The artwork and panel structure work more towards creating an atmosphere than the "BAM! POW!" dynamism one is trained to expect from reading superhero comics. I agree with dandoody about the "fever-dream" atmosphere, that does seem to capture how I feel about it. But it does create its own sort of dynamism, if not the one you’re looking for.
There is something awkward about the book, though, and I have to ask: Is the letterer the person responsible for placing word balloons? Whoever does it has a really bad habit of pointing word balloons to a speaker "off screen" when they could easily be connected to the speaker in different panel or between panels. Theeasiest example is the third panel on pg 17: Cuthbert’s line could easily have been connected to his balloon in the second panel, allowing Alain’s own balloon to to sit closer to his self. All that said, it would have freed the entire left side of panel 3 from obstruction and let the spatial juxtapostiton Jae Lee was going for to become more effective.
Personally, I found the way Cuthbert’s attempt to ford the river was impressively funny, especially with the reveal about the waterfall.
I liked this issue, but then I really liked the first issue of The Gunslinger Born, too(That series’ failing, I felt, was based on adaptation not form). Lee and Isanove, it seems to me, are working something that is really beutiful and engaging in own right, but it requires letting go of some arbitrary expectations and assumptions we have about reading: what you call "the basics".
Sorry guys. Still don’t like it.
That’s cool. The irony here is the comics appeal more to me, someone who has little interest in the prose books—where SK’s verbosity always sinks me some 80 pages in—while they have absolutely no appeal to you, a huge fan of the books and someone who is squarely in Marvel’s target audience for the series, and the reasons for both are pretty much the same.
I just finished the trade hardcover of The Gunslinger Born and while I too love Jae Lee’s art work and have read the entire Dark Tower series and loved it, I did have some issues with the series thus far. Jae Lee is amazing, I loved his work in Transformers/G.I. Joe and have sought him out since then but in this series there seems to be too many panels where the characters look to be posing for a picture rather than in the midst of an action. I also had an issue with the writing. I think they nailed the story so far but some elements weren’t as stressed in the comic like they were in the book. I think Susan Delgado is a very important character and the love story between her and Roland should have been more thought out and given more time to get readers attached.