Written by Team Editor Conner Lopez

What is the Dark Tower?
The dark tower is not the destination, its not the journey, its something inside of you. The dark tower is the magnetic force that pulls or pushes you through your life towards something inevitable. Foreboding as it sounds, that something isnt neccesarily bad, in fact its quite the opposite.

The dark tower may be an event, it may be a person, it may be place, it may be a state of mind. Its not something that we can avoid because the dark tower is something that happens in your life, and every decision that you have ever made has led you to it.

In Stephen Kings The Dark Tower series, the dark tower is simply a physical entity that our protagonist is trying to find.

Roland, the last gunslinger in a desolate and bizarre world, is on a seemingly endless quest to reach the dark tower. Nothing will stop him. Not sacrifice, not pain, not love. He will not be distracted, for it is his destiny.

The paths of our lives are defined by shockingly few decisions.  Big decisions, small decisions, its all the same. The decisions that alter our lives are most often completely unnoticeable, and happen in tiny increments over time, imperceptible to us. Endless possibilities, but only one possible outcome. The one that actually happens.

Most of us are not gunslingers. Most of us dont have the luxury of being conscious of the journey we are on and its inevitability. It is only after we have arrived that we realize where we were headed. Unlike storytelling, our life is not a lucid narrative that begins with a conflict, has a climax, and an ending. Its all these things at all times.

When looking at Rolands journey through the eyes and art of Michael Whelan, you can see the majestic beauty in Rolands epic journey.

Stephen King wrote the Dark Towers series over several decades. Michael Whelan walks us through that same journey visually with his art. In the beginning there is The Gunslinger 88' 

with Roland in the foreground and the dark tower behind him. Roland is ancient, and it is here that we take up the journey with him, to watch him in his final stretch to the tower. His world is dusty and colorless, his soul weary.

Next we see one of the most iconic visions of the series in The Gunslinger On the Beach.

Here Roland sits on the beach watching a beautiful sunset, finally facing the tower that is his destiny. This beach is featured prominently in The Drawing of Three.

In Legends: The Gunslinger, Roland is stepping through a crucial doorway towards the Dark tower.  

It is here that he discovers he will need other people to complete his quest, even if it means sacrificing them. Do the skulls on the ground represent those he has left behind?

Every story needs an antagonist. The Crimson King.

Finally in The Dark Tower Roland breaks down the fourth wall and looks at us, bleeding, holding The Rose, at last in reach of the Dark tower.

Michael Whelan illustrates for us a vision that we all have collectively in our heads of this epic series. We are able to see what we have thus far only read and conjured in our minds. Art has the power to give us as individuals an experience together, as we all see something universally that we have so far experienced only on our own.

More than a story, the series is an enormous allegory for a determined march through the crush of life and time to a distant destination at all cost.

Stephen King told the story of the Dark Tower, and Micheal Whelan showed us through art what it looked like.

Now its up to us to live it.