2007 Hot Issue

HOT ADAPTATION: The Dark Tower

"The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed." So began the first book of Stephen King's magnum-opus mash-up, The Dark Tower series, a saga that's at once Sergio Leone Spaghetti Western, Arthurian myth and H.P. Lovecraft ­horror. King started the series more than thirty years ago, and it includes elements from the prolific writer's entire fictional universe -- some forty novels, hundreds of stories and millions of words.

To the delight of rabid fans who thought they had said goodbye to The Dark Tower when King published the seventh and final installment in 2004, he recently supervised a run of Dark Tower comic books -- complete with the untold tales that the books only alluded to -- and now that visually stunning series has been collected into a single graphic novel, The Gunslinger Born, out next month from Marvel Comics.

Unlike the books, the comics begin with the origin of the gunslinger, the lead character inspired by Clint Eastwood's Man With No Name. "It's not just an adaptation," says Gunslinger artist Jae Lee. "What we're doing is telling a brand-new story about the gunslinger's youth. It took a lot of blood, sweat and tears. The first seven issues took me about two years."

Lee and painter Richard Isanove are ­already at work on the ­second volume of the series, due next spring, and this time "it's a ­hundred percent brand-new material," Lee says. "Fans are definitely in for a surprise." --Sean Woods

Check out more pages from The Dark Tower by clicking here.