The Dark Tower Companion

by Bev Vincent

  Q: Were you familiar with Stephen King’s work when you were asked to work on the Dark Tower series?

  A: I used to date a girl in college who was a huge Stephen King fan and she always wanted me to read The Gunslinger. She was such a fan of it, I frowned on it just to bust her chops. I started listening to books on tape when I was working on X-Men and Daredevil. That’s when I listened to my first Stephen King. It was Bag of Bones, and he read it himself. I was looking for books that authors read themselves. I thought it was really cool. I loved it, and ever since, probably at least a third of the books I’ve listened to on tape were Stephen King’s.

  Q: How did you react when you were offered the chance to work on a project with Stephen King?

  A: After Wolverine Origins, I thought, okay, that was my Mount Everest. There was so much publicity about it and it was such a big seller that I didn’t know how to top it. Then I got Neil Gaiman’s 1602 and I said, okay, cool, I get to work with Neil Gaiman. How was I going to top that? The next thing I know I’m working with Stephen King. I don’t know what else. Maybe I’m going to get the new Bible to illustrate or something.

  Joe Quesada knew I was a big Stephen King fan. I had already talked about it with him. Once I said, “Why don’t you guys get Stephen King to write something for you?” At the time that’s when Stephen King had decided to retire. So they thought, it’s not going to happen. Then Quesada called me back a few years later. “You’re a big fan of Stephen King, aren’t you? What do you say about coloring a few pages by next week?”

  Q: Short notice for a very important presentation.

  A: Yeah. They called me on Tuesday and the next Wednesday King was supposed to come in. Jae started drawing the pages. They started coming in on Friday, I think. It was supposed to be three pages. Then it became four pages. Then it was four pages and a cover. It just kept adding up.

  King was coming to the Marvel office on Wednesday morning at nine a.m. Since I’m on the West Coast, it was six in the morning for me. They had to put the whole presentation together before, and they wanted to print it out on big boards with a fake “The Dark Tower” to pretend they were doing a whole cover. We were just cranking, and it turned out that Jae finished the cover on Tuesday night. I was still coloring the pages. He sent it in, and I had too many windows open and my computer crashed just as I was uploading the last cover. I had just finished that huge background of the double-page spread on pages three and four. Because of the way it crashed, I was able to recover the file. It was a miracle. I had worked for four to six hours on that background. It was this massive thing of clouds. I was trying to show off. I was like, okay, what do I do good? Clouds! Clouds and sunset and all that. And it worked, because I guess in that first interview Stephen King was saying that when he saw the purples and all that, that’s when he was sold.

  It was really cool because Jae was a big fan of the books, too. I’d read pretty much everything I could get my hands on except the Dark Tower. Since it started to seep into the other books, I knew I had to sit down and listen to it. There’s a copy of The Gunslinger that King had recorded, but I had the one recorded by Frank Muller. I had tried a couple of times and I just couldn’t get into it. The tone is so different from everything else he does. It was not what I wanted in a Stephen King book. When I started working on it, of course, I played it through. And, actually, The Drawing of the Three is probably my all-time favorite of his books. Once I got into it, I kind of enjoyed the first one, but the second one, I was so excited about it. I really loved it.

  I like that you can connect to his characters right away. Within a couple of pages, you feel you understand the characters because they’re always bright, or people that you can relate to because they always do the right thing but still things are bigger than them. It’s not like in horror movies. People jump out just as the monster is coming. No, his characters stay hidden, but they still get fucked. They react like you would. Especially in Bag of Bones. All the feelings that he was tapping into are so realistic that within a few pages I was totally engrossed in the book.

  And that’s usually how it works. But in the Dark Tower, since it’s also told in such a descriptive way, it takes a while to get into it. The tone is almost grandiloquent. I listened to it twice from beginning to end and bits and pieces, depending on what we were working on. I wanted to refresh my memory on the scenes. The second time I listened to The Gunslinger, I enjoyed it greatly because now I knew who Roland was and I was just happy to be with him again. That’s the thing: there’s not much character development in it. You discover him through the story. But once you know the character, you enjoy The Gunslinger much more. In the Tull story, he’s kind of a jerk. He really grows as the book goes. Even in The Drawing of the Three, he’s still kind of there, but because he is weakened physically, you relate to him. I think it really was a stroke of genius; cutting his fingers off at the beginning of the story just suddenly made him human when he was this archetypal jerk, a guy that guns down people just because he doesn’t like them. As it went, suddenly he became more human and from then on you cared about him. As soon as he gets wounded, suddenly the whole paradigm changes on him and it really becomes very engrossing.

  Q: Without the inking step, how is the pencil art conserved when you paint it digitally?

  A: The line is still there. That’s why I like to work from pencils—the frailty of the line shows more. When you look at a painting, even at a Frazetta, sometimes you can still see the line appearing through the paint. That’s what I’m trying to do—have the color cover everything but still have the line show through. I put a color in the line art so it becomes one with the color instead of being a layer of black with a layer of color underneath. I’m trying to reblend the two as if it was in the painting. Use the line art as a contrast element, not just as an incisive line. It’s not just there to separate the red from the blue. There’s going to be a little bit of purple in it so the two colors blend within the line art. It’s a darker value of the color, but it’s usually not totally different. It’s part of the color vocabulary.

  With Jae, the work we did at the beginning was to integrate the blacks, because he likes to use big black areas. I started to put that splatter into it. I use a lot of toothbrush splatters. I have five different patterns and densities of toothbrush patterns that I scanned that I reuse. Then I fill with color and I superimpose them to get different densities. That allows me to integrate the line art into the color, because color is put into the line art.

  Q: Is this a process that would only work with a computer?

  A: When I used to paint, I always liked using a toothbrush. It’s a great finishing instrument. It gives a grittiness to the page. It gives textures and makes it a little bit more interesting. I used something similar on Wolverine Origins, but I was using a canvas texture. I scanned a canvas where I did some rough gray-scale painting on it. I used that texture to have two layers of color. When you look at a canvas painting, you put on a first coat of paint and then, if you go with a drier brush, you’re going to have the full color; and then, as there is less paint on the brush, only the top layer of the canvas is going to be affected, so the grooves keep the original color and the second layer of color only appears on the upper layer of the canvas. It creates a pattern and that’s an easy way to blend colors. I always thought that was a very interesting way to have two different values, two different colors, appearing at the same time, like a screen painting. That’s what I was trying to do with the splatters because Jae said he didn’t want me to use that effect.

  On 1602 I did it by using etchings, because in the drawing he did all of these little etchings at forty-five degrees, so I tried to mimic that with the color, so the whole book is just made with forty-five-degree etchings of different colors. It seems almost impressionist. By putting two colors next to each other, you get a third color. Instead of mixing them, I would have a green and a slightly bluer green and you come up with an interesting aqua with lots of textures to it. That’
s what I’m trying to attain there. Jae wanted something different on The Dark Tower. He didn’t like the canvas, and I was fed up with the etchings. I wanted to do something else anyway. I always used splatter as a finishing tool and I said, how about making that the main thing? Since the world is coming to an end, that will give this impression of having dust in the air all the time. Pretty much it’s like colored dust all over the whole book. I liked the idea from the Ridley Scott movie Legend, with Tom Cruise. There’s always dust in the air in that movie. There are always particles floating around the characters to create depth. You could actually feel the light. I thought it was a perfect vehicle to explore that, to have this impression of thick air. No matter where you go, you’ve got this dust that’s defining the space.

  Q: Do you have color themes for characters or settings?

  A: 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: The layout for the Dark Tower graphic novels is more basic than some of the contemporary graphic novels.

  A: 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: How much do you interact with the pencil artists during this process?

  A: 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: What was your favorite section to work on?

  A: 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. Fo
r 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”—which 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: 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.