Pretty Vacant: The Dark Tower: The Way Station #3 Review

Like most guys who came of age during the 1980s, I grew up as a Stephen King freak. And like many of those guys, I was a Dark Tower fanatic, initially because you just couldn’t get the Goddamned thing. The first Dark Tower book was listed in King’s C.V. starting with Pet Sematary, but until 1988 it was only available in a long sold out limited edition that, provided you could even find a copy, would requiring beating off other like-minded fanboys to get it. Possibly literally.

But once it, and its sequels, started reaching the mass market, it hit the sweet spot for comic book fans. It was a fantasy, but not one about some other wimpy pretty boy with a magic sword. No, Roland was a bad motherfucker who was well-trained with a gun – medieval Batman with a sandalwood-handled .45. And as the series went on, it tied into King’s other stories. And his other stories tied into the Dark Tower (which is one of the only redeeming reasons to read King’s Insomnia). He built an entire, cohesive universe tied to the actions of Roland and his hunt for the Tower, turning his entire body of work into a continuity-laden universe. This shit was crack for a comics fan.

The Dark Tower series officially ended in 2004 (although King’s dropping another book of short stories set in the Dark Tower world called The Wind Through The Keyhole later this year), but King kept feeding the fans’ back monkeys by authorizing Marvel to produce Dark Tower comic books, which they’ve been doing since 2007. The initial pitch to stir up the rubes – including me – was that the comics miniseries would fill in gaps in the stories from the novels. And some of them, like The Fall of Gilead and Battle of Jericho Hill, have done just that. Unfortunately, others have just retreaded parts of the original novel in comic form as straight adaptations.

The current mini, The Way Station, is a straight adaptation. It’s an adaptation of a part of the first Dark Tower book that takes place in and around one building, where a lot of the dialog is internal in nature. This isn’t probably the best thing to try to make into a comic book.

The story in this book is pretty simple: Roland wakes up, talks with Jake – a kid from our world who Roland found just waiting at this farmhouse – goes into a cellar for some canned food, goes back to sleep, and leaves in the morning. Sure, Roland talks to a dead guy somewhere in there, but it’s a dead guy buried in a wall who acts like an oracle; it’s not like there’s a zombie attack to look at in here. Like I said: it’s a hell of a story to make interesting… or even coherent in a comic book form.

The first eight pages of this book are a dream Roland’s having and his own internal reaction to that dream, which is beautifully drawn and colored, and gives artist Laurence Campbell some fun gun battles to draw. And Peter David, as he has with all the Dark Tower comics he’s scripted, gets the jargon of Mid-World down pat. But the problem is that, in the interest of visually depicting Roland’s internal dialog, what we get are a bunch of panels of The Gunslinger yammering to himself like he forgot to line his Stetson with tinfoil. It works as a story, but as a comic, it just doesn’t fire well for me.

The middle eight pages of the book – the action, if you will – depicts Roland going into a cellar for canned food. That’s the high-tension guts of the book: a pantry raid. It’s not even a beer run. And yes, Roland speaks to the dead during this sequence, but we never see the guy; it’s just a voice. And yes, there are spiders in the basement, which are drawn very well by Campbell and a primary reason why I now hate him. But it still amounts to a dude collecting cans and swatting at bugs… much like a guy who forgot his tinfoil hat. Yes, I jest a bit, but what made this sequence suspenseful in the novel – imagining these spiders scuttling around in the fetid dark – is blown away by showing it in comic form, robbing it of its power and turning it into something ultimately disappointing.

But none of that disappointment comes to the art, drawn by Campbell and colored by Richard Isanove. The Dark Tower comics have always included art that looks a lot like fantasy pinups, of the sort by Michael Whelan, Bernie Wrightson and Dave McKean that appeared in the original novels. The pictures are presented in realistic styles with deep shadows, dark blues and bright oranges in light effects that give the book a unique and beautiful look unlike many comics you’ll come across. If you’re a fan of fantasy paperback covers, you’ll like the look this book. And again: Campbell draws a hell of a giant spider. Prick.

This comic is the middle issue of a five-issue miniseries, so it’s probably unfair to judge the entire product based on a single, middle issue. And, to be fair, the middle issues of almost any miniseries are the weakest points. But this particular issue adds nothing to The Dark Tower mythos beyond visuals, albeit stunning ones. If you’re a Dark Tower completist, it doesn’t matter what I say because you’ve either already bought this book or have reserved the trade collection. If you’re thinking of picking it up to see if it fills in anything that the novels don’t? This isn’t the place to go.