by Bev Vincent
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 win—and, 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: Do you have favorite characters?
A: 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 part—my 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.
Q: What sort of feedback have you gotten from Stephen King?
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.
King sent a note when we did The Sorcerer, since it was an offshoot. It was not in the general story line. It was Robin’s original story and all that, so he said he really enjoyed it, so that was very cool. I’ve been very lucky. Every time I’m pulling an all-nighter and I start to bitch, I just think, “You know what? I could be doing something that isn’t as much fun,” so I just shut up and do it.
MICHAEL LARK
Like Robin Furth, Michael Lark, pencil artist for The Battle of Tull, is originally from Pennsylvania, but considers himself a native Texan. He studied design and advertising at University of North Texas on an art scholarship but found it not to his liking. He wasn’t into superheroes as a kid, so he wasn’t into comics until he went to the local comic book store with the drummer in his band in the mid-to-late eighties. Here he discovered the independent, alternative black-and-white underground comics of the era and decided he could draw those himself. His first comic was published and his reputation grew through word of mouth. When people offered to hire him to do superhero work, he decided that was a good way to earn a living. He started with DC and then moved to Marvel. His first superhero gig was drawing Superman for a graphic novel written by Roy Thomas. He drew Batman for Gotham Central, and has spent time working on Daredevil, Captain America and the Punisher and Spider-Man during his twenty years in comics.
The following interview was conducted via telephone in November 2011.
Q: Were you familiar with the Dark Tower series before you started working on the Tull book?
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.
Q: What is your process for an issue of The Battle of Tull?
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 descri
ption 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.
Q: Some of the other artists sent pencil art to Richard Isanove. How does inking come into the process?
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.
Q: The early page layouts were designed in anticipation of people coming to the comics who weren’t traditional comic readers. Did you feel you had the flexibility to be more contemporary or experimental with the layouts?
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.
Q: Do you do your own bubbles or areas for dialogue and commentary to be added in later?
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.
Q: How much did you feel like you could go your own way in depicting Roland? Did you have to refer back to the way the previous artists had made him look?
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.
Q: What’s your approach when it comes to introducing new characters like Allie, Sylvia Pittston or Nort the Weedeater?
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.
Nort was easy. The toughest one for me was Allie, because I didn’t want her to be ugly. I wanted her to be attractive. I don’t know how successful I was. The other characters were pretty easy. Sylvia Pittston was an interesting story. I use models to reference all my characters when I draw. All of the male characters are me. I alter them accordingly. I have an assistant who helps me out, and she was Allie. She was a little thin girl, and I needed somebody bigger than life for Sylvia. I had put out an ad that said I needed a larger-sized female model and had a really hard time getting somebody. I drew the cover that Sylvia is on using somebody that was a friend of a friend, but she wasn’t really that interested in being a model. She was just doing it as a favor.
Then I got this response to my ad and went to meet this woman. When we e-mailed each other before we met, she said, what are you working on? And I said I’m working on a thing that Stephen King has created. I walked in the door and she goes, “It’s Dark Tower and I’m going to be Sylvia Pittston, aren’t I?” I was like, “Yes, you’re hired.” To me, she was Sylvia Pittston. She was bigger than life, with this huge personality. She had the crazy wild hair. She was fantastic. She made the character so easy to draw. She just made her come to life for me.
We finished our first session, shooting all the photos for the first issue she was in. I called her up to schedule the session for the second issue that she was in. Just days before I called her she’d been diagnosed with leukemia. It was pretty sad. She came and did the second session but the last one we needed to do, she’d already been undergoing chemo. They had to raise money, and I ended up donating all the pages that I had drawn that had Sylvia Pittston on them to a fundraiser for them and Steve donated a signed copy of one of the limited-edition hardbacks for them to use for the fundraiser as well, which was super-nice of him.
Q: Some of your panels, especially toward the end, have a lot of people in them. Do those scenes give you nightmares?
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.
Q: How long does a typical issue take you?
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.
Q: Do you have a favorite scene or panel?
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.
Q: How much interaction did you have with Richard Isanove during this process?
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.
Q: How is your process different when you’re doing a cover versus the interior?
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!”