ENTERING THE DARK TOWER IV: ROBIN FURTH

[MattBrady]

Of all the names associated with the upcoming Dark Tower: The Gunslinger Born miniseries launching from Marvel next month, Robin Furth draws the biggest question mark.

Hardcore fans of Stephen King’s magnum opus know her name well – she painstakingly researched and wrote both volumes of Stephen King’s The Dark Tower: A Concordance, which contain every single fact about the seven novel story. She’s also Stephen King’s research assistant, and as a result of her work, knows more about the world of Roland the Gunslinger, and the Tower than anyone else. True, you could argue that Stephen King knows more, since he created it, but that would be a technicality. After all, when King has a question about the world he created, he e-mails Furth.

As such, Furth will be tasked with moving the story of the first miniseries, pulled from Wizard and Glass from its novel roots to a comic.

We spoke with her about that, and more.

Newsarama: Obviously, comic book readers are familiar with Stephen King (well, most earthlings, are familiar with Stephen King for that matter), Peter David, Jae, and Richard - but you kind of...stand out. Can you give the quick version then – the A&E Biography of Robin Furth…who are you and how did you get to be where you are?

Robin Furth: You’re certainly right about Steve—I think even Martians know who he is! And unlike Peter, Jae, and Richard—all of whom have established reputations in comics—I’m the dark horse of the project.

Basically, I came to Marvel’s Dark Tower series via Stephen King and our beloved protagonist, Roland Deschain. Roland, Steve and I have been working together since the end of 2000, when Steve took me on as a research assistant. At the time, I was a grad student at the University of Maine and Steve was still recovering from a terrible car accident (he’d been hit while walking near his house in Maine). Though he was in a lot of pain, Steve wanted to finish his magnum opus. But before he plunged back into the Dark Tower universe he wanted a reference manual, one that allowed him to track all of the characters and places listed in the four published books of the series.

Enter Robin. As a fan of Steve’s work and as a long-time fantasy junkie, the job was a dream come true. Hence I went pretty wild. What I gave to Steve was a lot bigger and more detailed than he expected. I had the manual bound in black and even drew a magic door on the first page. (As any fan of the series knows, you can only jump from our world to Roland’s via a magic door.) I even taped a door key to the front of the book. (I didn’t want him to be locked out!) I guess Steve was amused by my enthusiasm, because after that he handed me his manuscript in installments so that I could continue expanding my Concordance.

When Steve and Chuck Verrill (Steve’s editor) began to discuss the possibility of transforming Roland’s story into a comic book mini-series with Marvel, they thought I’d make a pretty good consultant for the project since I’d lived in Mid-World long enough to become an honorary citizen. In the end Marvel took me on not only as a consultant but as the person responsible for the plots. I’m also writing articles and folktales for the series.

NRAMA: So, officially, when you started the Concordances - were you working with King then, or was it an independent project?

RF: I was working for Steve, though sometimes I wonder whether it was actually Roland who got me the job. I have some pretty good Roland ghost stories…can characters be ghosts?

NRAMA: What attracted and then hooked you to The Dark Tower? Were you a reader from the very first publication, or did you find it later?

RF: By the time I started working for Steve, I was already a big fan of his other work, but I hadn’t read The Dark Tower series yet. Still (if you don’t mind me dropping into Dark Tower speak for a minute), my ka and those of Roland and the Tower were probably already bound. A couple of months before I began the books (and months before the job for Steve even entered the realm of possibility) I started to have weird dreams about a desert landscape above which shone this strange, red, demon moon. In those dreams I had to crouch down in the high grass and hide from this nasty witch who was searching for me. She wanted to kill me. But the weirdest of all the weird dreams were the ones about the Tower itself. In those, I found myself balancing atop this huge, grey-black edifice. The sky was stormy and the wind howled all around me, so much so that I was afraid I was going to be blown off the top. In each of those dreams I clung to the stones and stared down into the Tower’s center. Inside there were no steps, no rooms, no nothing. It was this swirling vortex of time/space that wanted to suck me into it. Pretty scary, but pretty amazing! So, I suppose you could say that the Dark Tower books resonated with a very deep part of my imagination. I love Mid-World’s haunted desert landscapes, its Arthurian legends, and its monsters. I’m also fascinated by the fact that Mid-World’s war-torn, irradiated ruins so closely resemble the buildings of our world. On a different level of the Tower, Roland’s ancient history and our culture’s distant future are one and the same.

NRAMA: So – you were already there, waiting. As King came back to The Dark Tower in full force, what was your role in assisting him? What would a typical information request be like?

RF: I remember once Steve sent me an email that said what does Jake have in his backpack?

Now that might sound like an innocent enough question, but you have to remember that Jake ran away from home at the beginning of book 3, and between that time and the end of book 4 he’d battled a Mansion Demon and entered another world. He’d lost his shoes, he’d been kidnapped, and his bag had been dropped, taken from him, and rummaged through by other people. He’d picked things up and thrown things away. I could write a book about the adventures of Jake and his backpack! Another question that Steve asked me was how much money does our ka-tet have? To answer that I had to reread the series to see if Steve ever mentioned what change the various characters had in their pockets, whether any of them carried a wallet, etc. Did they find money (even Mid-World money)? Did they lose any? As well as in-book questions, I ended up doing a lot of strange research. Want to know how much a taxi cab ride across New York would have cost you in 1964, 1984, and 1999? I can go back through my notes and tell you. Want to know about weird weapons and shields designed to help security forces battle crowds? I have notes on that too. I can tell you how to how to design, forge, and shoot one of Roland’s sandalwood handled guns. I’ve mapped Mid-World and I’ve traced Roland’s journey through that landscape. PHEW!

<>b>NRAMA: So…brag if you must - but come on - at this point, who knows more about Roland and his world?

RF: Probably nobody. I dream about Mid-World!

NRAMA: Had you and King had any discussions about the possibilities of stories that could be told prior to meeting with Marvel?

RF: When Steve finished the final book, I couldn’t believe that Roland would rest easy. I told Steve that I really thought Roland had more tales to tell. I wouldn’t be surprised if, even after these comic books are finished, Roland resurfaces yet again!

NRAMA: We've heard Joe Quesada's version of events form the meeting that King had at Marvel - I believe he said you were on speaker phone...what did that entail from your end? Was Mr. King riffing ideas, and you were keeping track and seeing what could work?

RF: I really was on a speaker phone (an ordinary telephone on my end of things) and boy was I nervous! Steve had a very powerful vision about how the comics should progress, so as he spoke I took loads of notes! Beforehand Chuck had asked me to supply everybody with information about the main characters of Wizard and Glass, so I’d emailed that before the meeting. A couple people had a good laugh about what I sent, because it was so long that all the printers ran out of paper before it finished printing. (Once again, I was overly enthusiastic.) Being on a speaker phone had one major disadvantage—there was a presentation of Jae and Richard’s art and I couldn’t see it!

NRAMA: Picking things up after that meeting - we've heard about the production from the Marvel and creative side of things, but after that initial meeting - and the agreement - where did things go for you?

RF: The first thing I had to do was produce an issue by issue plot. That meant taking Wizard and Glass—a novel of almost 700 pages—and condensing it down to a story that could be told in seven comics of roughly 24 pages each. Yikes. To make the whole thing more difficult, the story had to be transformed from one that existed in little bits of black typeface to one that was completely visual. Since I didn’t come from a comics background, it meant that my learning curve wasn’t a curve at all but a straight vertical ascent.

Luckily for me, the editors I’ve worked with at Marvel—Ralph Macchio, John Barber and Nicole Boose—are all really great. Their feedback really helped. I’ve also always loved illustrated books and graphic novels, so I just had to let my mind play. I guess the difference between transforming a story into words and transforming a story into something that can be drawn by an artist is really just a difference in emphasis. In both cases, you shut your eyes and watch the plot unroll before you. It’s just that when you write for illustration, you have to spend a lot more time on what happens and a lot less time on the inner dynamics of the characters. The inner dynamics have to be shown, not stated, if that makes sense!

NRAMA: So what's the working relationship between you and King like for this first miniseries?

RF: Like I said earlier, I’ve been working within the boundaries of Mid-World for a very long time, so I know Wizard and Glass like I know the contours of my face. The scariest thing was creating a condensed plot that Steve felt good about. After I finished my initial draft, I sent my storyline off to Steve and Chuck to get their feedback. They both really liked it which was a huge relief. The places I needed to turn to Steve—and to pick his brain—were in those scenes that depart from the ones depicted in the published book. Writing those was kind of like trying to create those scenes that happened between chapters, if you know what I mean!

NRAMA: From what you’ve said, and talking to Peter, Jae and Richard, it's been explained that this first miniseries is basically an adaptation/exploration of Wizard and Glass. How much new material is in it?

RF: The story is the same, though we had to reduce the number of characters and condense the action. That being said, I really think that fans of the series will find some interesting additions. Although we adapted Wizard and Glass, we could draw from information gleaned from the other six books of the series. Hence readers both new and established will find out a lot more about what the Man in Black/Marten Broadcloak/Walter O’Dim was up to while Roland battled the Big Coffin Hunters in Hambry. They’ll also learn a lot more about that Prince of Chaos, the Crimson King.

Actually, let me give you this statement that I wrote up to clarify the relationship between the novels and the comics:

Stephen King’s seven Dark Tower novels are about Roland Deschain, the last surviving gunslinger of a poisoned land known as Mid-World. Mid-World, which in many ways is a future version of out world, has moved on. Thanks to a catastrophic war that happened in the distant past, most of the land has turned to desert and time itself is unraveling. By the time we meet Roland, he is probably in his thirties. His home city of Gilead has been destroyed by anarchy and rebellion, and all of his old friends are dead. When The Gunslinger opens, Roland is pursuing a wizard called “the Man in Black” over the desert. Although Roland chases this wizard (whose name, we later learn, is Walter), the wizard is not Roland’s final quarry. Roland wants to find the Dark Tower, which is the linchpin of the time/space continuum. Only by reaching the Tower will Roland have a chance to heal his world. At the end of The Gunslinger, Roland catches up with Walter. In an extended night, Roland and Walter hold palaver, and Roland has a vision of the Tower. At the end of the palaver, Roland falls asleep. When he awakes he appears to be ten years older, but in actuality almost 300 years have passed. Walter appears now to be no more than a skeleton in a rotting black robe, but this is just another one of the wizard’s tricks. Walter/the Man in Black, continues to be Roland’s enemy throughout the series. Roland wants to get to the Tower, but Walter (and his leader, the Crimson King) want to get there first.

In the next two novels (entitled The Drawing of the Three and The Waste Lands), Roland draws three companions from our world and trains them to be gunslingers. They are Eddie Dean (from New York 1987), Susannah Dean (from New York 1964), and eleven-year-old Jake Chambers (from New York 1977). (Roland first met Jake in The Gunslinger, but he let Jake fall to his death so that he could catch up with the Man in Black.) Roland and his new ka-tet discover one of the six magnetic Beams that hold the Dark Tower in place. Traveling along the path of the Bear-Turtle Beam (and frequently journeying back into our world), our tet remains true to their ultimate goal—to reach the Dark Tower and to save a wild rose which is our world’s incarnation of this linchpin of time/space.

What makes Wizard and Glass different from the other books in the Dark Tower series is that it is the story of Roland’s coming-of-age. Although the rest of the series focuses on Roland as an adult, Wizard and Glass focuses on fourteen-year-old Roland and his two early ka-tet mates, Alain Johns and Cuthbert Allgood. In this book we learn what Roland’s world was like before it moved on. In many ways it is the story of Roland’s doomed love affair with a girl named Susan Delgado, but the novel also tells us much more about Roland’s home city of Gilead, about the gunslingers, about the ancient wars that poisoned Mid-World and about the coming war which will devastate it once again. Although the first issue of the Marvel mini-series begins with an image of Roland pursing the Man in Black, the rest of the miniseries deals with fourteen-year-old Roland’s adventures, all of which are adapted from Wizard and Glass. The next few miniseries will follow Roland as he grows, and as his city, and world, fall into anarchy and rebellion. In essence, readers will learn how the young Roland of Wizard and Glass became the hardened warrior that we come to know so well in the rest of the Dark Tower novels.

NRAMA: Got it. Marvel has recently announced the inclusion of the extra material in the first issue - talking about the maps at first - how were those created? What were you pulling from?

RF: The map information was drawn from Steve’s books. Basically, I went back through all seven volumes and extracted the information I needed. (I used my own Concordances to find the page refs!) Then I drew drafts which I sent off to Marvel along with long lists of information about the landscapes. Unfortunately my maps always look like they were drawn by a six year old, so you can only imagine how embarrassed I was to send them off to a Marvel artist! The information I sent, and my map drafts, helped Jim Califiore create the beautiful maps which you’ll see in the comics. I believe that Jae’s wife June was the colorist.

NRAMA: And the short story - first, is this your first time writing a Dar Tower story?

RF: Ah yes! Each comic book will contain at least one Mid-World folktale. These were really fun to write. One of my early ambitions was to be a folklorist, so I loved expanding on the vast mythology which Steve hints at throughout the series. The first story is about Mid-World’s sacred geography. The second (which will appear in issue #2) concerns the origins of Maerlyn’s Rainbow, the nasty glass spheres which cause Roland so much trouble. Although this is my first time writing a Dark Tower story, I’ve been publishing poetry for years in both the US and the UK and have one finished novel and one almost finished novel. However, this will be the first time any fiction of mine has reached such a big audience. I really hope the Dark Tower fans like it.

NRAMA: The Concordance is one thing...but tell us what it was like to write a story both from the standpoint of being one of only a very few others who's been allowed to play with these particular "toys."

RF: It was great. I loved writing the Concordance, but organizationally it was a nightmare. I couldn’t drop a single detail, since I knew that I couldn’t let the hardcore Dark Tower fans down. I was afraid they’d hate me if I messed up! In many ways, writing the storylines was like revisiting old friends. I’ve always loved Cuthbert and Alain and secretly wished that Steve would return to them and tell us the rest of their story. Lucky me, because I’ve gotten to accompany them on their new travels! As far as the writing itself goes, that too has been a lot of fun. As I said before, I write both fiction and poetry, so entering characters heads is a familiar activity. What always surprises me though is how strong-willed characters can be. They want to be themselves, and they’ll give you hell if you try to boss them around and make them do things that are contrary to their natures.

NRAMA: Aside from King himself, you're probably one of a very small number of people who's spent as much time "in" the world of the Dark Tower...how does the miniseries compare with what you've seen in your head all these years?

RF: Steve King was in London a couple of months ago and the two of us got to look at the issue #1 art together. Steve’s response sums up my own. He said that seeing Jae and Richard’s art was like having the stories he’s told step right out of his head and onto the page. It’s amazing.

NRAMA: While there's still some more to do with this mini - you surely have one eye on the future. After this first miniseries, where do things go in terms of large landmarks in Roland's life?

RF: There’s a long rollercoaster ride to come. Fans of the Dark Tower series will get to accompany Roland all the way from Hambry to the killing fields of Jericho Hill. I won’t say any more because I don’t want to ruin the fun!

Previously:

Entering the Dark Tower I: Peter David
Entering the Dark Tower II: Jae Lee
Entering the Dark Tower III: Richard Isanove

[The Guvnor]

Nice interview. This series will be awesome.

[EmeraldGuy32]

Gah!! I need...this...to...come...out...NOW~!!!!

[michaelman9]

a crazy ammount of work to do by one person

[Jeremy Holstein]

Becoming Stephen King's research assistant sounds like a dream job, but Robin really earned her stripes. Her Concordance was an amazing piece of work!

-J

[Glass]

Very infomative piece. This mini-series couldn't be handled better by anyone else. I'm happy King could come up with the ideas, Robin could plot them, and David could finish it off!

February 7th can't come soon enough.

[spyflip]

I can't wait I really wanted to start reading the series but they are so many books already out I was scared to try to read them all. So this will be a great way to see if reading the series from the beginning will be a good investment. I’m curious to know if these adaptations are successful at all for a comic company. Devil Due tried those Drizzt books, but to me at least; it didn't seem to have any real effect in adding more readers to our hobby? Or an increase in sells.

[drollia]

Originally Posted by spyflip

I can't wait I really wanted to start reading the series but they are so many books already out I was scared to try to read them all. So this will be a great way to see if reading the series from the beginning will be a good investment. I’m curious to know if these adaptations are successful at all for a comic company. Devil Due tried those Drizzt books, but to me at least; it didn't seem to have any real effect in adding more readers to our hobby? Or an increase in sells.

I think that the Drizzt Books are doing just fine. The crystal Shard just finished and Streams of Silver will be out soon. So i don't think that they are doing poorly.

Also the Anita Blake Books are selling out. If they want to add more people then more advertising needs to be done. While I am sure that many people know that the Dark Tower series is going to be a comic, think of how many more people don't.

[Scavenger]

Originally Posted by spyflip

. I’m curious to know if these adaptations are successful at all for a comic company. Devil Due tried those Drizzt books, but to me at least; it didn't seem to have any real effect in adding more readers to our hobby? Or an increase in sells.

Devil's Due doing Drizzt isn't really comparable. Drizzt is pretty non-mainstream, being a D&D character. And Devil's Due is rather low profile.

Marvel/Daebel Bros doing Anita Blake is a better comparison (though even that fails as Hamilton is nowhere near King in terms of followling).

[spyflip]

Good point, still I hope these adapt's are successful. So far King hasn't really been doing it for me for the last couple of years. I would like to try the series out but with seven books out that’s a lot of time and money. So I plan to check these comic out, so hopefully my interest will be captured. I do agree that those other adaptations need to be promoted more. I know Hamilton fans who didn’t even know there were comics made.

[Oeming]

Wow, this is crazy good looking stuff!

[AbacusComics]

This series will definitely bring new readers into the comics market.

[Jigokuman]

Originally Posted by spyflip

I can't wait I really wanted to start reading the series but they are so many books already out I was scared to try to read them all. So this will be a great way to see if reading the series from the beginning will be a good investment. I’m curious to know if these adaptations are successful at all for a comic company. Devil Due tried those Drizzt books, but to me at least; it didn't seem to have any real effect in adding more readers to our hobby? Or an increase in sells.

I'm guessing this project will show its true strength when the trade comes out and King fans find it in their Barns&Noble.

[brucewayne1]

Excellent, informative interview. Although I have never come close to meeting her, because of her enlightening passion and incredibly hard work on this long and complex series of books, Robin Furth has always seemed like a constant companion to me whenever I dive into the Gunslinger's imaginative world.

[Wayne-KC]

Originally Posted by Scavenger

Devil's Due doing Drizzt isn't really comparable. Drizzt is pretty non-mainstream, being a D&D character. And Devil's Due is rather low profile.

Marvel/Daebel Bros doing Anita Blake is a better comparison (though even that fails as Hamilton is nowhere near King in terms of followling).

But both the Drizzt and Anita Blake offerings are adaptations from their books, right? (I know Drizzt is and think the Blake one's are). The Dark Tower books will be using the characters but coming up with new stories. Right? That is much more exciting then the other two and not comparable, IMO.

But you are right in that it needs to be advertised in more mainstream ways.