Authors: Hans-Ake Lilja
Lilja:
But the first story arc is pretty much gonna be from
Wizard and Glass
?
Ralph Macchio:
Largely within
Wizard and Glass
, yes.
Lilja:
Are you nervous about the second one, where you’re going off on your own?
Ralph Macchio:
No, no, no, because as long as Stephen is involved at a very early stage of it and, of course, as long as Robin is there as the touchstone…no, I’m perfectly confident. As I say, we got the guidance from the master and because we have started this thing well in advance, both the second and third story arcs have already been plotted out.
So, while I don’t want to say anything about it—I think that would be unfair to the readers and it would also spoil the surprise—I think we’ll need to keep that close to our vest. What I can say is that the second and third arcs have both been written up, discussed with Stephen and gone through Robin. We’re ahead of the game and that’s something we’ve been able to do because we got this project started well in advance.
Lilja:
The first issue got somewhat delayed, right?
Ralph Macchio:
Yes. I can’t really speak to that exactly except that I believe there was some kind of publishing situation. We didn’t want our publishing schedule for the comic to interfere in any way with anything else being published that Stephen had written. We didn’t want there to be any conflict of interest or anything like that, so that may have involved delaying it a bit, which was certainly not a problem. It gave us more time to work on it, to hound it, to refine it and perfect it.
Lilja:
I remember reading somewhere that Jae said he could have the time to go back and change small details.
Ralph Macchio:
Yes, he did, and as I said, this is particularly true with issue two, where we introduced Walter O’Dim, or Marten Broadcloak as he is already known, and also the Crimson King and the Big Coffin Hunters. It was important that the first impressions of these characters really, really stick in your mind, and Jae wanted to make sure that they were definitive looks for them visually, so he went back after he’d done the first versions and felt they could be stronger, went back and did a second and third version, and what you see in print is what we got.
Lilja:
Is there any chance you’re gonna let the fans see the early stages of the characters?
Ralph Macchio:
I believe, because we have told Jae to hold on to everything, that when we do the omnibus versions, when we do the hardcover, in all the different formats that this is going to be repackaged in…every scrap of material, you can be sure, will see print.
Lilja:
That is very nice to hear. I know that you’re also releasing the issues with different covers?
Ralph Macchio:
Yes, we do have alternative covers, a number of them, and will probably continue that all the way through. It gives people a little collector’s item sort of thing. We like it and also we have been able to go get some really top talents to work on some of the other covers. So, you get a chance to see what Joe Quesada’s version of it looks like as well as others. We just got another one in today. It’s by Leinil Yu.
Lilja:
Is that for issue 3?
Ralph Macchio:
Yes, it’s for issue 3. It has Roland as a big foreground figure pulling his guns out of the holster. It’s beautiful, very impressive. So we have a variety of people doing covers. They are nice collector’s items—gives everybody a sense really that they’re getting their own version of the comic, so that works out well for everybody.
Lilja:
How does that work? Do you invite other people to choose an illustration from Jae’s or do they do their own?
Ralph Macchio:
They do their own. And sometimes they will approach us about it. In other instances we approach them. It can go either way. If we hear from a big name guy, “Hey, I understand you do alternative covers of
The Dark Tower
and I’d like to do one,” we would be crazy to turn whoever it is down so…but then we also have our own list of people that we wanna go to and say, “Why don’t you give this a shot for us?”
Lilja:
Is it usual in the comic business to do a lot of different covers?
Ralph Macchio:
It has been over the last ten or fifteen years. It’s become kind of a staple of doing comics. When you get a big project you like to do alternative covers because, again, as I say, it’s something that gives the reader the sense that he’s getting kind of his own copy, he gets a chance to not only get the main copy with that cover on it, but he also gets a chance to get variant editions. I know this has just been done recently on the
Eternals
book and where John Romita, Jr. has done all of the mainstream covers, but then Nick Lowe the editor has gotten a variety of variant covers on that as well.
Lilja:
Were you ever worried that the fans might think it was a way for you to get more money out of this? I mean, a lot of fans feel they have to have everything, even if they really can’t afford it. They are such collectors that they are just gonna buy everything that is published.
Ralph Macchio:
Sure, we are aware. This is a publishing company, and we are aware there is a collector’s mentality and that there are people who wanna collect every version of it, but at the same time nobody forces them to. We can only put it out there. If the demand is there the readers will pick it up. It’s not like we say, “You know you got to have this.” It’s really their decision. But at the same time this is a publishing company and like any business you’d like to maximize your profit if you have the right vehicle for that.
Lilja:
This is going to be a lot of issues. If I’m correct there are going to be five story arcs and about thirty issues in total.
Ralph Macchio:
That’s about right.
Lilja:
Are you gonna release them back-to-back or is there going to be a time lag?
Ralph Macchio:
There is gonna be some time lag.
Lilja:
Between the different arcs?
Ralph Macchio:
Between the different arcs, yes. It gives us a little chance to recharge because this is such a work-intensive project, as you can imagine. From the writing, the coloring, the penciling, all that. Really, our creative staff needs a little time to just sit back, collect their thoughts, recharge their batteries and jump back into it. And it also has other publishing reasons too, because you need to see how well things are doing, you want to keep them out there for a while, you want to take that first arc, begin repackaging it in a different format and at the same time hold up on the second and third arc for a little bit and again, that also works to our advantage, gives the creative team a time to just sit back and collect their thoughts again.
Lilja:
So, it’ll be something like one story arc a year?
Ralph Macchio:
No, no, I don’t think so. I don’t think there will be any kind of break like that. I imagine there will be a few months in between. But that is just my speculation. I don’t know, and I don’t know if anyone knows exactly. I know we have simply talked about there being a time lag between them, but I don’t believe there will only be one story arc a year.
Lilja:
That’s nice to hear.
Ralph Macchio:
Oh, yeah. Look, we want to get the stuff out there too.
Lilja:
I read on the Net that some of the fans were a bit disappointed that they wouldn’t get to see characters like Eddie and Susannah or Oy in the comic. Did you ever plan to do one story arc that took place a little bit further into the story so you could include those characters?
Ralph Macchio:
We’re kind of growing this thing organically and if it seems to work we certainly will. We do envision this as a long-term thing, so at this point we have tried to pinpoint the areas that we really want to tell right now. These are the stories we think are important and if it doesn’t work with having Eddie or Susannah in there then it just doesn’t. When you think of it,
The Dark Tower
encompasses dozens and dozens of characters and everyone has their favorite. We have to pick and choose; it’s a huge publishing undertaking. Those seven books are about three feet in height if you put them on top of each other [laugh] and there are many, many characters in there. I have some that I would like to see too and hopefully over time we will get to them, but if they don’t fit in the first two or three arcs, that’s the way it goes. We’re not gonna shoehorn them in just to show them.
Lilja:
No, and you don’t want too big of a leap between arcs, right?
Ralph Macchio:
Of course not.
Lilja:
So, what is your role in this? Are you working with Robin on the scripts?
Ralph Macchio:
Yes, as the editor I really oversee the entire project. The art, the coloring, the whole thing: what an editor does on any other book. This is a bit different though because you’re dealing with an outside force in that you do have Stephen King at the top of the pyramid, which is just where he should be. We want his approval and approbation and his guidance every step of the way, and he gives that.
What happens, and again, you may find my statement in variance from Robin’s because we may all have a little sense of the creative process, but the way I recall our working is that Stephen really sets the tone with directions of the story line at the very top, and then he and Robin will discuss the framework and the outline. Robin then talks to me and the people I work with here at my end. The other editors, John Barber and Nicole Boose, and I then discuss with Robin the arc, the whole story arc. Then Robin goes off and she writes up the arc, each individual issue, all collected as a seven-issue arc, six-issue arc, or whatever. She then sends that arc in and John, Nicole and myself go through it and we get back to her with critiques and comments and then she and I will discuss those critiques and comments and she will go back and rework whatever it is that we have agreed upon that needs to be reworked, sequenced, added to, a climax put at the end of an issue that wasn’t there before or things moved around, and that’s really the creative process.
But as I said, a lot of it is organic. For example: between issue six and seven something had popped into Jae Lee’s head. He was looking at issue six and he was looking at the actual outline and he called me up and said, “You know, there seems to be something about issue six that just seems to kind of tell the events of issue seven, and if you’re familiar with the books you know this is exactly how it’s gonna happen,” and I said, “You know, Jae, that is a point we hadn’t considered. Why don’t you talk to Robin and Peter David about this and if you guys come up with some workable solution to it, let’s go with it.” So then, absent me, Robin, Peter David and Jae all discussed the ending of six and all of issue seven. Basically they reformulated it and it worked in a much better way because Jae had hit upon something that just hadn’t occurred to any of us. We were all very close to it and I guess as Jae was reading it through he just found something in there that was like, “Oh, this could work even better if we did it this way,” and I was more than happy to let them go their own way because we weren’t deviating from the story line, we were simply improving it, we were kind of reformulating it to make it stronger. To make that last issue in the arc and the end of the sixth issue an even stronger piece.
Lilja:
Do you often agree on things or are there issues that some of you feel very strongly about while others don’t? Or do you have the same ideas of what should happen?
Ralph Macchio:
We all seem to have agreed upon…One of the things at the very beginning was that Robin was not used to working in the graphic format. She is a writer, and a fine writer, but she was not used to writing comic book plots. They require a different set of skills than a short story or even a novel because you have to, in many ways, think visually, because it is not your words that are going to appear in print, it’s the pictures you tell the artist. That’s what’s going to appear in print, and then you put your words in there. So, in this instance, one place that I think Robin would agree that she needed to sort of work into was to really think visually, to think that what she was writing down in these plots needed to be as strong visually as possible. And she got the hang of it pretty quickly. That was an area that we as editors and we as people who deal day-to-day in the graphic format were able to really, I think, give her the necessary input for those first couple of issues. So that when she had turned them in, we discussed them and she said, “Yeah, you know, there are places where I could have thought more visually or this sequence I should have realized should have been something visual, so let me go back and rework it.” But then again, she is a fast learner and she got the hang of it pretty quickly, and now she’s fully up to speed on the whole thing of how to handle it visually.