Originally, I broke the story [The Gunslinger Born] into eight comic books, but when the editors at Marvel thought we should make it more compact, I managed to cut back to seven.

My job on The Gunslinger Born was to take Stephen King's novel and transform it into a detailed, seven issue, scene-by-scene story.

I suppose that, for me at least, the biggest difference betweenThe Gunslinger Born and the next two story arcs (The Long Road Home and Treachery), is that while Gunslinger Bornwas a translation of an existing novel, the next two arcs are really the stories that I've been weaving since I first started working with Steve King on the Dark Tower back in 2000/2001.

This is going to sound strange, but I really feel I know Roland very well. In Wizard and Glass, I got to know the young Roland, and then as I traveled with him from Eluria (found in the story "The Little Sisters of Eluria") through Tull and the Mohaine Desert (The Gunslinger), and then all the way to the Dark Tower.

In the earlier novels, Steve King tells us that John Farson, and perhaps even the Crimson King himself, are but other names and faces that belong to Walter O'Dim. However, in The Dark Tower, he tells us very clearly that Walter, John Farson, and the Crimson King are actually separate individuals.

Bringing Mid-World to a new readership felt like a big responsibility, but I'm so glad that readers have enjoyed the story. That is a reward in itself.

In order to capture Mid-World for new readers, I had to streamline the original tale [ The Gunslinger Born], but I also had to incorporate scenes from earlier Dark Tower novels.