Wolf Moon #1 a pretty good, too-expensive werewolf comic

I hope someday DC finds something both interesting and worthwhile for artist Jae Lee to do. He has such a unique, particularly interesting style, and while I think it has its limitations—it can be a fine line between minimalism for style's sake and just not drawing stuff because drawing is hard and takes a long time—he's capable of really great work.

Look at this cover for Wolf Moon, a new movie-pitch style miniseries from Vertigo by writer Cullen Bunn and artist Jeremy Haun (with colors by Lee Loughridge). It's basically a werewolf transformation scene of the sort that's central to werewolf movies, presented in a way I've never seen or even imagined before. The wolf monster is seemingly bleeding out of the human character, like some sort of mass of fluid ectoplasm taking the shape of a werewolf, morphing and warping her body. It's a pretty unique take on a person turning into a wolf (or hey, maybe it's a wolf turning into a person), and of the sort that can be extremely effectively rendered in a static drawing, perhaps even more effectively than it could be in any other medium.

I wouldn't mind seeing a whole book on this fairly universal, even generic genre by Lee just to see what he would do with it, but he's just doing the cover. DC seems to make okay use out of him as a cover artist; he's been killing it on the covers for the new crime comic direction of Catwoman, but his comics-comics work has seemed somewhat wasteful. He scabbed out a Before Watchmen project which I've heard a few people say was one of the better looking ones, but what kind of asshole wants to read a Before Watchmen book? And he's done a pretty interesting job on the issues of Batman/Superman he's managed to draw, but the stories haven't really been worthy of the art (competent, occasionally entertaining generic superhero fare), and his pace usually means other artists are involved in every one of those stories.

But hey, great cover on Wolf Moon #1.

The book opens with a group of hunters and dogs in Kentucky, on the trail of some animal that's been mutilating cattle. The dogs pick up a scent, the hunters release them, the dogs tear off into the woods barking furiously, and then then their barks turn to whines from somewhere off-screenpanel, and then an eerie silence sets in. If this was a movie, we would probably then have a reaction shot from the hunters, while an unseen monster cuts through them and the credit sequence begins.

But here, this being comics, we get to see the monster immediately—right on page two! Just seven panels in!

As you can see, Haun has drawn what I guess you'd call the default werewolf of the day: Big, broad-shouldered, hairy humanoid form, with no tail, no genitals (despite what Monster Squad has to say on the matter), samurai sword-sharp claws (he slices the hunters to pieces on the next page) and a gigantic, wolf's head.

We probably haven't talked about this at too great length before, but I think about werewolf design an awful lot, and I struggle when it comes to deciding how I think werewolves should look. There's somethng inherently wrong about wolf-men in general, if you ask me, in that they are so often made into some kind of weird gorilla hybrid with a wolf's head on top of it, and claws that are more cat-like then wolf-like (I have never been attacked by a wolf before—knock on wood!—but there more about biting with their jaws than slashing with their claws, you know?

I like the pointy-nosed, snout-having wolves like the one Haun draws, and which seems the more popular one these days, then the sort that Lon Chaney Jr. played in The Wolfman, your basic dude with beard that covers his whole face, pointy ears on the side of his head, sharper than usual teeth, and a dog nose. That's always struck me as more of a dog-man than a wolf-man.

Sometimes I think the way to go with werewolves is the way they appear in the Twilight movies, or the Amanda Seyfried-as-sexy-Riding Hood movie from a few years back; just big-ass wolves, the size of lions or horses, possessed of a human intelligence.

Wolves just aren't all that scary in a post-agrarian, post-industrial revolution age. I mean, I wouldn't want to fight a wolf, but if it was just one wolf, and I had a rock, I'm pretty sure I could take it (although I would do a lot of screaming, crying and bleeding in the process). A pack of wolves would be a different story, but then, they hunt in packs; a lone wolf is just a skittish stry dog, really. And given that they're pretty much exterminated, I find them to be creatures of pity more than terror. Like much smaller, less dangerous panda bears.

I think there is something to the idea of a monster wolf with human traits though. As much as I think the horse-sized, smart wolf might be the best way to go with werwolf portrayals, the sheer unnaturalness of a wolf that can walk on its hind legs and use its forepaws like hands is pretty fucking scary in a surreal way. But then, bipedal werewolves don't usually appears as wolves on their hind legs,but, as I said, more like Bigfoots with wolf-heads and cat-claws.

The wolf Haun draws above certainly fits into the category. At the very least, I think he needs a tail and wolf-shaped legs.

This is my faovrite drawing of a werewolf*, which I must have shared here before, since I found a scan of it on my computer. It's from a Chronicles of Narnia role-playing book I had as a child, although I'm afraid I can't remember which or who drew it:

I like how it's face suggests a wolf or some kind of monstrous canine animal, without just looking like a wolf's head; there's an element of the alien to it, like it's a new species of wolf-like animal. I also likehow the legs have features in common with both human and canine legs, and the long, bony fingers on the right hand, as if it has four aye-aye-like death fingers.

That's pretty close to my ideal werewolf, I think. If I were designing a werewolf—or telling someone else to design one for me, as I can't draw 1/100th as well as that illustrator or Haun can—I think I'd want it to have a head and hands and maybe the general shagginess like the Narnian werewolf there, hind-quarters like those of a wolf, a wolf-like tail, and the general body shape, posture, locomation and size of a very large baboon.

...

What was I talking about? Oh, Wolf Moon #1.

So we see the wolf making short, bloody work of the dogs and hunters over the course of two pages, and hen we meet our protagonist and narrator, Dillon. He's a handsome-ish guy with short-cropped dark hair, long sideburns and a series of scars on his face; they're so close together and so shallow though, they seem like they might have come from a real wolf, rather than the brute we see chopping through arms like Obi-Wan Kenobi in a cantina and knocking off heads with a single blow.

He is in the midst of telling his attractive significant other that he's got a lead on the werewolf, which the pair each have their own history of some kind with, and is planning to follow up on it in Kentucky. It's only around for three nights a month, during the full moon, so time is of the essence.

Back in Kentucky, a guy who works in a fast food restaurant has locked himself in the bathroom and is splashing water on his face. And then he transforms:

Beating heart—or are the thumps his banging on the sink with his fists?—the sound of bones rearranging themselves, hairy back ripping out of shirt, pretty standard stuff, and the actually transforming taking place off-panel.

The monster then goes nuts, and in a really great panel, seems to be completely fucking gigantic now:

I think there's just something off in the panel, the sound effect coming too late or something, because the sound effect implies he's in the act of breaking that window in that panel, meaning his other leg is still in the restaurant and making him, like, I don't know, 20 feet tall.

He's large—large enough to fit a whole human head down to the neck in his mouth—but he's smaller than the Big Boy-like statue outside of the restaurant, and his head no higher than the roof of a car, which he is presumably crouched near, as I'm taller than the roof of most cars.

Anyway, Dillon arrives in time to fight the werewolf with the front end of his pick-up truck and a gun with silver bullets, but he hesitates, and does no more than wound the creatures. Then he goes to search out another character previously mentioned in passing to talk about stuff with, all the while narrating a little more and giving us some background on Wolf Moon's werewolf.

So plot-wise, it's pretty standard action horror, with nothing in the way of a twist this far in (And, to be honest, it doesn't read much like a Vertigo comic, it's so straightforward). Bunn does add one neat idea though, an angle on werewolves which I've never heard, if anyone has used this angle before.

Explains Dillon:

The legends are wrong. It's more than some curse, more than some Old World disease. It doesn't pass from one person to another through a scratch or a bite. With every cycle of the moon, it...moves...finds a new host. Near as I can tell, it's totally random.

So while people turn into werewolves, they do so all of a sudden, and with no apparent cause. And after the three nights of the full moon, the person so chosen or possessed by he wolf returns to normal—or as normal as possible—while the werewolf will emerge from some other poor sap's body. that's new. I find that interesting.

Interesting enough to keep reading a $4/24-page monthly with only that, Haun's nice art and Lee's nice covers to sell it to me...? Well, no. But I'll certainly check out the trade in a few more months.

I noted both that this reads a little like a movie pitch and not so much like a Vertigo comic, and that's true—but I don't mean to suggest that Bunn took a movie pitch and gave it to Haun to illustrate, or that he is hoping this gets picked up for TV or by a studio or anything. It's just very, very movie-like, from the character types, to Dillon's "Down boy" quip before shooting at the werewolf, to the wolf itself, which looks like a very large specimen of the sort that appeared in, say, Cursed, even moving about stiffly and awkwardly, displaying its chest and arms like a guy in an old-school Rick Baker wolf suit might.

This may be a comic book, but it's not a story being told in a way that necessitates it being a comic book. You know how well Lee's illustration of a transformation sequence works there, the way that would only really look in a context-less, drawn image? Nothing on the inside approaches this. Wolf Moon could just as easily have been a TV show, a film or a prose novel. That doesn't necessarily make it a bad comic, but it sure keeps it far from being a great one.


*My favorite film designs of werewolves are probably those in the excellent Dog Soldiers. I haven't thought about this question long enough to declare it my favorite or the best werewolf movie or anything, nor have I re-watched it in about five years, but I remember thinking, "Wow, those are some really cool werewolves," while watching it.

Review: Wolverine: Wolverine's Revenge

As far as story mechanics go, writer Jason Aaron rather beggars belief with the planning he attributes to the antagonists of this collection, The Red Right Hand. This is the same group that sent Wolverine's soul to hell and filled his body with demons that then set about trying to kill off all of Wolvie's loved ones in the previous two volumes (Wolverine Goes To Hell and Wolverines Vs. The X-Men), but as bad as that fate might seem, it wasn't even the Red Right Hand's endgame. Apparently they—or at least their leader—knew Wolverine would escape from hell and reclaim his body, which is why they've engineered this particularly insidious revenge against the character. The whole literally sending him to literal hell was just the means to the end of getting him good and pissed off enough to come at them.

The title is somewhat subversive, then. While Wolverine is hunting these people and is hunting them down seeking his righteous vengeance, they are busy enacting their real plan, and his revenge fizzles, as they get theirs during what should be our hero's moment of triumph.

The structure is fairly repetetive, with each of the first five issues collected here (drawn by pencil artist Renato Guedes and inker Jose Wilson Magalhaes) featuring Wolverine entering a room to battle a member of the weird-ass group The Mongerels to the death (Like Cannonfoot, the gorilla-looking guy who kicks rocks super-hard at his opponents using special, rock-throwing shoes), while a member of the Red Right Hand flashbacks to their experiences with Wolverine, and which of their loved ones he killed (The group isn't really one of supervillains so much as ordinary civilian types who have a reason to want revenge against Wolverine, who killed one or more of their loved ones—sometimes because they were bad guys, sometimes because he was mind-controlled or whatever).

When Wolvie's killed the last of the Mongerels and entered the room where all the members of the Red Right Hand await him, he gets a triple-whammy of emotional assaults, one rather prosaic one that barely effects him, another that frustrates him in a coitus interruptus kinda way, if we view Wolverine stabbing people with his fist-knives as a form of coitus for the character and another particularly tragic and Shakespearean (or at least Greek tragic) existential gut-punch to the invincible hero's psyche.

Props to Aaron, then. I had a hard time suspending my disbelief regarding the whole counting on Wolverine to beat up the devil himself in hell aspect of the plan, but the final stages are truly creatively evil and, to some degree, unexpected.

It sends Wolverine on a sort of self-destructive spiral during the last two issues collected herein, which Goran Sudzuka illustrates, in a flatter, sparser but ultimately more emotive and comic book-y style than that of Guedes.

Wolvie completes a few tasks of repentance, completely withdraws from girlfriend Melita and the two superhero teams he runs with, and resorts to two extremely unusual coping methods. The first is unusual for him, at leas to my limited Wolverine knowledge: He keeps climbing a mountain and then jumping off the top of it: His healing factor won't let him actually die in this manner, but his brain dies for a few moments each time, giving him complete, death-like peace. And then he starts over.

The second method is only unusual for people who aren't Wolverine: He grows a beard, takes off all his clothes and runs with a wolf pack for a while, until some evil-ass humans remind him he can do some good in the world, and Melita manages to hunt him down...after interviewing all of Wolvie's peers in the superhero community (This last chapter of the trade nicely echoes the ".1" issue in the previous collection, in which Melita tries to throw a surprise party for Wolverine, and invites all the X-Men and Avengers).

(As usual, Namor knows the truest measure of a man)

Best of all, this gives Sudzuka the opportunity to draw a large chunk of the Marvel Universe, and given his skills, that's certainly a welcome opportunity to see him taking advantage of.

Curiously, this story really reads like an end not only to this cycle of stories (Goes To Hell, Vs. The X-Men and Wolverine's Revenge), but like Aaron's final words on the character. The series would keep going for several more story arcs, though, including the previously reviewed Goodbye, China Town and Back In Japan.

Jae Lee provided the cover images for all of the issues that are contained in this collection, and while they are generally nice cover illustrations with a high degree of theatricality, I was quite amused by the cover of Wolverine #15, which seems to indicate that Lee has never in his life seen a picture of a wolf, but was just going by second-hand descriptions from people who have seen wolves:

Delayed Reaction: Dark Tower: The Gunslinger Born

Dark Tower: The Gunslinger Born (Marvel Comics), by Peter David, Robin Furth, Jae Lee and Richard Isanove

Why’d I wait?: It was with some trepidation that I read the first issue of the seven-part series. Marvel’s relentless hyping of the book was a huge turn-off, but it was the sort of case where the publisher saying it was an event so often and so loud genuinely made it an event, and as a critic I felt I needed to check it out for myself.

Despite having no previous experience with the series of novels it’s based on, or any great affection for the work of the artist or the writer (at least, not when he’s in paycheck mode), and despite being sick of hearing about Marvel’s adaptation of Stephen King’s Dark Tower series long before I even cracked the cover, the first issue was pretty enjoyable.

It just wasn’t anything I felt I need to drop a couple bucks on every month, and so I stopped at #1.



Why now?: I recently saw it on a Best of 2007 list from a fairly reputable source, and was surprised to see it there, given the solid-but-unremarkable nature of the issue I’d read (And the complete silence of the comics press and blogosphere on the book).

Of course, now I can’t remember whose list it was, or where I saw the link to the list. So maybe there was no list; maybe it was all a dream.

Anyway, I began to wonder if it was actually great after all, and my local library had a copy of the hardcover, so I was able to read the whole series with zero financial risk.



Well?: Well, it’s not that great, and, despite the obviously high production value and extra care taken in it’s presentation, as a graphic novel, it’s not even a very good one.

But before I get into the story part of the book, I did want to say a few things about the overall package, which is a pretty nice one, especially by Marvel standards. Things that will probably drive this post way off topic, so bear with me (and/or just skim until you hit something that interests you).

Marvel has always been pretty terrible at graphic novel design, and if you’ve ever encountered their books in a big box bookstore, you’ll know exactly what I mean. A shelf or six full of Marvel books, shelved spine out, look almost identical—it’s a wall of black, with the identical Marvel logo and the title of the book on the spine, completely uniform, no matter what the book is or what the format is.

There’s some variation—glossier hardcovers will have gold lettering as opposed to the trade paperbacks’ red and white Marvel logo and individual title logos—but they all bleed together, with nothing jumping out. (The only exceptions are the digests, which are more colorful and often shelved with the manga, and the Essentials, which have a spine fat enough to accommodate a clearer presentation of the books’ logo, although they’re also always black).

Compared to the DC/Vertigo/WildStorm books, in which many series have their own trade dress and design, or the Fantagraphics and Drawn + Quarterly and AdHouse books, in which great care has been put into ensuring that the books look good from all angles, or especially the manga, which is a veritable candy-colored rainbow of eye-grabbing design, Marvel graphic novels look like small press text books for an economic class you have to take if you want to graduate.

Nothing particularly flashy is done on the spine of this trade—other than leading off the title with a bigger “Stephen King’s,” which may actually be all it needs to fly out of bookstores—but the overall package is a nice one.

The cover has the words “The Dark Tower” super-imposed over a much bigger “Stephen King,” which makes his name clearly visible, but without comically eclipsing the title of the actual books (as in Brad Meltzer’s first Justice League trade or Jodi Picoult’s Wonder Woman trade, for example. (Also, if you didn’t really scrutinize the fine print, you might even think King actually wrote the book, instead of serving as its “Creative Director and Executive Director,” as the credits page says).

Inside is a one-page introduction from Ralph Macchio, and an afterword by King, plus a brief How-I-Made-This-Comic-Look-So-Shitty section by Richard Isanove, and 24 pages of covers and variant covers, seemingly by every artist in Marvel’s employ: Joe Quesada, David Finch, Stuart Immonen, Leinil Francis Yu, John Romita Jr., Steve McNiven, Billy Tan, Olivier Coipel, Greg Land and J. Scott Campbell all contribute what amount to cowboy pin-ups.

All the extra material, particularly the text pieces, reminded me of the good old days of Marvel and DC trade paperbacks, when the graphic novel market was barely in existence (back when Watchmen, Maus, The Dark Knight Returns were the only things you were guaranteed to find in a bookstore; anything else was just gravy).

I’m old enough to remember when Marvel and DC generally only published trades of books that were so popular that there was no way for new readers to find the comic books themselves anymore, and that the trades existed to meet exceptional demand, and/or keep stories in print that were important in some way, stories that new direct market customers would want to read throughout the next several years, and “civilians” might pick up if they saw it in a bookstore or library.

In a way, that’s how you could tell a book was good. Sandman must be a much better series than Shade, The Changing Man or Doom Patrol, because it was in trade. Batman: A Death in The Family and A Lonely Place of Dying must be more important Batman stories than, say, Batman: Blind Justice or Batman: Year Three, because DC put the former out in a trade but not the latter.

These trades were treated as special occasions, and usually had introductions by name writers in other fields, or even other prominent comics writers, telling you how awesome they were in the beginning.

Now, introductions seem rare to the point of non-existent, and trades have lost that sense of the special. In fact, DC and Marvel seem to publish everything in trade now, without much thought for what audience might exist for it. (Teen Titans: Titans East is a trade, for example, and I was genuine surprised DC printed that once as a monthly comic book, let alone again as a book-book. Paul Dini’s Detecive Comics run is being collected along with non-Dini fill-in stories that were only solicited and published the first time to fill gaps in the monthly book’s schedule, not because they had anything to do with Dini’s story). For some reason, often time The Big Two seem to print their trades, like their comic books, for direct market readers who prefer that format, rather than for a wider audience.

So even if I wasn’t aware of all the relentless hype The Dark Tower received prior to the first issue’s release, if I was a customer flipping through this in a book store, it would certainly seem like it was a special occasion, compared to all the other Marvel and DC graphic novels on the nearby shelves.

What’s that?

Oh yeah, I used the word “shitty” to describe the way the book looks a few paragraphs back, didn’t I? Okay, that was pretty crass, and maybe a little mean-spirited, but this is not a very well put together comic book story, something which is even more remarkable when you consider the amount of effort that went into it.

The weaknesses in Jae Lee and Isanove’s art, and their failure to compliment or even match up with Peter David’s script throughout the story, isn’t quite the same as Ed Benes not being able to draw a single background in 22 pages or refrain from drawing a woman’s mostly-bare ass every six panels or so in Justice League of America; it’s not even Steve McNiven not drawing an actual big fight in the climax of Civil War, a story Marvel geared a majority of its comics line around.

This is worse. This is Marvel hyping a book like it was the second coming, this is Marvel garnering almost Death of Captain America non-comics-press attention (at the outset, anyway), this is comic shops opening at midnight to sell the first issue of a comic book!

Now, who actually does what on this book is a little mysterious, as the credits are so weird. What was King’s contribution, beyond the source material? I don’t know. There’s no “based on” credit for King, just the cryptic “Creative Director and Executive Director.” Robin Furth is credited for “Plotting and Consultation.” Third down the line with “Script” is Peter David.

I’ve no complaints on the story side of things really. I’m not a real fan of narration in comics in general, as it’s almost always unnecessary, but the narrator’s voice here is an interesting one—folksy and friendly and conspiratorial, it feels like the story is being told to you by an older relative, or someone sitting on a log across the campfire from you. I’m assuming the voice comes from the novels, as it’s peppered with the same slang that fuels the rest of the dialogue.

The names of places, charachters and conflicts are flung around with little to no introduction, and I felt a bit like I did watching a not very well-made sci-fi movie like, say, Chronicles of Riddick or Phantom Menace, where the characters seem to know a lot more than I do about everything, and I feel like I should know what they’re talking about.

While this happens as much in the seventh issue as in the first, it’s actually kind of almost a sort of pleasure, as I felt my way toward familiarity. I had no understanding of the setting in the first few issues—and kind of wished there was a recap page like in most Marvel comics—but by the end, I began to feel my way toward understanding. Is this in some post-apocalyptic future, I take it?

Part of my wrestling with the setting came down to Lee and Isanove’s art, as there is precious little in terms of addressing the setting. The book is almost devoid of establishing shots, a pretty basic tool in the comic book (or film…or TV) toolbox. It’s especially important in a book like this, set in a time or world not our own.

Lee’s panels are all pretty sparse, and I never really got a sense of where anything was taking place, or what if anything differentiated Roland’s home town from the city to the east he spends most of the adventure in, or the wilderness around it, or the trails between them. Likewise, the interiors all looked the same, be they hut or witch’s house or mayor’s house, rough roadside bar or classy inn, Roland’s mom’s bedroom or hell itself.

The result was a little like watching a stage play, with much of the setting left to the imagination of the reader. That approach may not always be wrong for comics, but I think it usually is—one great and oft-cited advantage of comics over film, for example, is the ease with which the set is built. A Dark Tower movie would have had to build all these locales, scouted landscapes and sent helicopters with cameras into the air to capture them, while Lee could have delineated them with pencil and ink, if he so chose.

Compounding the problem is Lee’s relatively weak sequential storytelling abilities. I don’t know if it’s peculiar to this project, which likely had more cooks in the kitchen and higher production demands than some of his past work (fewer folks had to vet his Fantastic Four: 1, 2, 3, 4 or G. I. Joe/Transformers crossover, I’m sure), but Lee chooses extremely close shots of his characters in every scene, with long shots being few and far between. All are horizontal, perhaps going for a cinematic feel, and closely cropped, cutting out backgrounds and other characters.

It’s a bit like watching a movie composed completely of close-ups—when new characters enter a scene, it’s disorienting, because you’ve no idea who else is in the room or how many of them there are (There are a few times where this is particularly noticeable, as when our three young heroes attack a supposedly vastly superior force, and we see no more than two or three of their foes at a time, or when they supposedly face 200 men, and we see no more than ten or tenty).

While great comic book art will tell a story, even a large part of the story, through the imagery alone, Lee’s art makes no sense without the words, and in a lot of cases makes little sense with the words, or even seems to contradict them in little ways here and there.

Many of the panels seem like the covers of comic books or prog rock albums or cheap mass market paperback novels, but they don’t flow into one another very well, or at all. They’re highly posed, and don’t reflect the passage of time in the same way that the dialogue does.

In other words, it’s really beautiful looking terrible comic book art, if that makes sense.

Maybe it's easier to show some weak bits rather than simply describe them.


In the above section, the middle panel states that the two characters kiss. In that panel, however, they seem like they're about to kiss, or, perhaps, have just finished kissing. But in neither the preceding or following panel do they kiss. Lee apparently chose to draw around the significant event of the page, which the narration explicitly points out.



What happened to the dude on the right's horse's head? Or did he dismount, run over, jump up and punch the other dude? And given how much time it would take him to clear the distance between them, on his own horse or off, why was the other dude still caught off guard?



According to the character, he's holding a "long" knife, which appears to be about the size of his thumb in that panel. We don't see any other images of the knife in the scene to indicate it is, indeed, a long knife.




The script makes clear within the next few pages what just happened, but it's impossible to tell from the part of the comic in which the event acutally occurs. Does that dude say "No, Dave?" because Dave is crumpling from an unseen, unheard blow from the person in the hat and coat? Or does he say "No, Dave" to keep Dave from maybe attacking that person?



What Isanove does to the art exactly isn’t entirely clear. Instead of being listed as colorist, he’s credit under “art” with Lee, and this seems in large part due to the degree of his contribution. Is he digitally inking Lee’s pencils? Trying to interpret the four-page “The Painted Process” segment at the end, that seems to be the case.

In eight steps, that feature demonstrates how Isanove constructed the first two-page spread on pages three and four from Lee’s “line art.” He starts with a photograph, tweaks it, adds Lee’s art, tweaks that, and keeps tweaking aspects until he gets to the finished product. That finished product is simply the grown-up Gunslinger posing on a rock, with a vulture flying nearby. It’s apparently dawn or sunset, as the sky seems aflame. It’s not a bad piece of art, but it’s damaging to the book as a whole, since almost every image is so luxuriously covered.

In that opening shot, for example, the sky seems to be aflame. In the book’s second-to-last panel, also a two-page spread, a character is burned to death at the stake, I think. The background looks identical to the original one, though, and the only reason I think the character is on fire is because the words mention her hair and clothes being in flames, which is not the case in the art itself.

Clearly a ton of work went into putting this book together, and it’s really a shame that so much work must be done in the eye and the mind of the reader to make sense of it.



Would I travel back in time to buy it off the shelf?: No, this is actually a much better package to enjoy the story in than the monthly installments would have been. Each of the seven issues is structured so that there’s a cliffhanger at the ending, and an awful lot occurs in each issue, so I imagine it would have read just fine in monthly installments. But this version is free of all those super-irritating ads Marvel runs for Spider-Man fishing poles and Wolverine candy action figures or whatever, and includes what appears to be every single version of the one million variant covers.

I don’t know if this is the case or not, but it seems to me that variant covers encourage waiting-for-the-trade purchasing in direct market customers. I’m sure there must be a segment of the consumers who do actually speculate on variants or collect them (or at least, retailers speculate that such a segment exists, and thus buy enough copies to justify publishers continuing and increasing variant cover publishing), but to the rest of us whose only interest in variants might be seeing different artists draw the covers, it certainly makes more sense to wait for a trade which is more likely to have all the variants.

Take the Marvel Zombies series for example; the fresh variant covers on each new printing was a large factor in each issue selling out. But why re-buy each new printing for a new cover, if you can just wait a few months and get them all at once in the trade?

Anyway, this is hardly a must-own graphic novel for me, and I don’t think it’s a must-own for anyone who’s not a Dark Tower fan already, but, in retrospect, if I were going to have bought the series, I’d prefer to have the graphic novel, where I can at least get a neat John Romita Jr. pin-up of the Gunslinger in the back, without having to pay extra for it.