I’ve made no secret of my love of Stephen King’s Dark Tower series, a sprawling, (maybe overly) ambitious, genre-blending epic that often feels like King’s magnum opus, warts and all. (For the curious, here are my reviews of the book from a recent re-read of the series.) Even so, it’s taken me a long time to read this graphic novel series, which covers the events not only of Wizard and Glass (the fourth book of the series, which covers a formative event in Roland’s life), but also of the events between that book and the beginnings of Roland’s solitary quest for the Tower. Some of that comes from financial concerns (I was buying the entries individually when they first came out, but started feeling like I was paying too much for such brief entries), and part of it just came from a desire to wait until the comics moved beyond the material that I already knew.
And that’s something I stand by, even having finished the entire arc of The Dark Tower: Beginnings. Ironically, the weakest parts of the story are those closest to King’s novels, covering material we already know – Roland’s confrontation with his teacher Cort, his relationship with Susan Delgado, even the final twist of Roland’s manipulation by the object known as Maerlyn’s Rainbow. Yes, Jae Lee’s shadowy faces and gorgeous artwork bring the scenes to stunning life, but these moments are by far the least compelling about the adaptation. Maybe it’s the overreliance on text and narration; maybe it’s that the events are so familiar that the adaptation doesn’t feel like it can play in the margins; maybe it’s just that King’s narration has so defined these events that this version can’t help but feel disappointing in comparison. Whatever the case, these parts of the story are the least essential aspects of Beginnings.
No, the draw of these books for Tower fans are the spots where it fills in details that have only been implied in the series proper. Hell, even the names of the final volumes – The Fall of Gilead and The Battle of Jericho Hill – will instantly conjure iconic moments for Constant Readers, ones that we’ve always wondered about but only been given hints and clues. The rebellion of John Farson; the background of Walter O’Dim; the nature of the Crimson King; Cuthbert Allgood and Alain Johns – all of these are things that we’ve been told little details about, but never given a long look. And Beginnings scratches that itch and then some, plunging us into the final days of Gilead before the fall and letting us see what the world was like before it moved on.
It’s the filling in of that world where Beginnings truly soars, especially when Jae Lee is given free rein to create images that are truly disturbing and upsetting. Whether it’s Farson’s blood red helmet or the Crimson King’s monstrous form, Lee draws out the horror aspects of King’s world effortlessly, giving us any number of images that truly unsettle and unnerve us. That’s maybe most true whenever he leaves behind the world of Gilead and dives into Maerlyn’s Rainbow, giving us a surreal nightmare landscape that’s utterly alien in its floating islands and blood red skies, yet always keeping the emphasis on the horror and never letting it become normalized.
The Dark Tower: Beginnings is a mixed bag, undeniably. The pacing can be strange, with major events feeling almost anticlimactically staged, and major events passed over with a burst of narration. And by the time it’s all finished, it feels less like a single cohesive story and more like a series of moments in time, lined up together to imply more than it actually says. And yes, there’s a sense that for a country we are seeing at its peak, like Gilead is supposed to be, it feels sparse and underpopulated at times, not the bustling city we imagined but something smaller and emptier.
But – and you knew there was a but coming – none of that keeps the moments of imagination and scope from really hitting. As we see Walter spanning time, or the Crimson King’s palace for the first time, or understand the true threat of John Farson, Beginnings justifies its existence as pure visual art, giving us images that draw out the surreal and the disturbing undercurrents of King’s fantasy epic. And if that’s not enough, there’s the chance to see a story play out in a world that I love – and that covers over a lot of flaws. Is it essential? Far from it. But for a fan, it’s going to be hard to not savor the best parts of this for what it is, flawed though it might be.
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