A review by trudilibrarian
The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger - Last Shots by Robin Furth

2.0

Here marks the concluding final volume of the original Dark Tower adaptation by Marvel comics and to say it's left me feeling underwhelmed is quite the understatement. It turns out to be a confusing mish-mash of stories that barely connect to what's come before. The first two chapters are spent on Sheemie and the Breakers and strive to explain the birth of the Tower, its crucial importance and the forces who wish to see it destroyed. This is major Dark Tower sacred canon that took King decades to build and make believers of us all. To see it watered down in the final volume like this doesn't sit well with me and strikes me as rushed and lazy.

Then we're offered another adventure of young Roland and his original ka-tet which is followed up by a re-telling of the legend of Arthur Eld and his defeat of Lord Perth (a kind of lame David and Goliath type deal that I can't remember well enough from the books to know whether any liberties were taken with the source material or not).

As much as I was stupid excited for this graphic novel adaptation, I was slow to warm up to the series; in fact I skipped over Volumes 3, 4, and 5 and didn't pick up the series again until Volume 6 [b: The Gunslinger: The Journey Begins|8728918|Dark Tower The Gunslinger The Journey Begins|Robin Furth|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1327977651s/8728918.jpg|13383675]. That's mostly because those first five volumes draw almost exclusively upon material from Book 4 of King's series -- [b:Wizard and Glass|5096|Wizard and Glass (The Dark Tower, #4)|Stephen King|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1327946510s/5096.jpg|750558]. I'm much more a fan of long, tall and ugly Roland, than young Roland and his original ka-tet comprised of Cuthbert, Alain and Jamie. So while the series did get better for me as it went along -- especially [b:The Battle of Tull|10661149|Dark Tower The Gunslinger The Battle of Tull|Robin Furth|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1327978743s/10661149.jpg|15570416] and [b:The Way Station|13115079|Dark Tower The Gunslinger The Way Station|Robin Furth|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1341104990s/13115079.jpg|18289032] -- there were way more lows than highs. Way more places where they got it wrong than right.

However, despite my lack of fangirling at this point, I'm deliriously excited by this news; the Dark Tower adaptation is continuing this fall with The Drawing of The Three: The Prisoner. Now we're talking!! Eddie Dean! New York! And hopefully some lobstrocities and astin. Oh yeah! [b:The Drawing of the Three|5094|The Drawing of the Three (The Dark Tower, #2)|Stephen King|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1370918050s/5094.jpg|2113248] is one of my all-time favorite books and I have to hope that adapting from this juncture in the narrative will result in a much more successful experiment than what we've seen up to now. Only the best is yet to come in a world that has moved on.