STEPHEN KING: MARVEL TO ADAPT THE STAND AS GRAPHIC NOVEL
Author Stephen King appeared on NPR’s Talk of the Nation interview program last week, and apparently let a cat out of the bag.
In responding to a question about his involvement in future adventures of Roland in The Dark Tower series (King said that he no longer has the same "imaginative channel" into the world of Roland that he used to, so no more novels from him are likely on the Dark Tower front or, of Roland's next "go around"), the best-selling author announced that Marvel would be adapting his apocalyptic novel The Stand as a graphic novel.
King said: “I did go to Marvel and asked them…if they would have any interest in adapting The Stand as a graphic novel, and they are going to do that – Marvel is going to do The Stand as a graphic novel.”
Regular Newsarama readers will of course recall at last year’s New York Comic-Con Dark Tower panel, King said that he and Marvel Editor in Chief Joe Quesada had spoken just prior to the panel about bringing The Stand to comics. At the time King said that The Eyes of the Dragon and his collaboration with Peter Straub, The Talisman would be good candidates as well.
King also praised Brain K. Vaughan's Y: The Last Man in the interview.
Marvel has not offered any comment or confirmation on King’s announcement.
The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger Born miniseries and subsequent collection was one of the publisher best-selling titles of 2007 (it hit #1 on many online seller lists on its debut). The first issue of the second Dark Tower miniseries, The Long Road Home shipped earlier this month, with issue #2 scheduled to be in stores on April 2nd.
In the interview, King also alluded to the possibility of the short Dark Tower story, "Little Sisters of Eluria" (first published in Legends: Short Novels by the Masters of Modern Fantasy) being worked in to the larger Dark Tower comic adaptation.
A Brief History of The Stand
Quite possibly Stephen King’s most popular individual book, The Stand first saw publication in 1978 from Doubleday. The lengthy novel detailed a struggle between two groups of survivors in a plague-ravaged America. Pieces of the story first began to germinate in the short story, “Night Surf”, which was collected in King’s anthology Night Shift.
In terms of the writing of The Stand, King described the initiation of the process in some detail in his non-fiction book, Danse Macabre. Originally intending to write a fictionalized version of the Patty Hearst saga, King found himself at loggerheads over the direction of the book; a combination of a radio preacher, thoughts of the novel Earth Abides, and a shadowy photo of SLA head Donald DeFreeze all coalesced in King’s head. What emerged after two years of writing was the tale of a weaponized plague that kills most of humankind; the survivors fall into two camps, followers of either the angelic Mother Abigail or The Dark Man, Randall Flagg.
King also attributes some of the genesis of the book to J.R.R. Tolkien. On his official website, www.stephenking.com, he relates, “Only instead of a hobbit, my hero was a Texan named Stu Redman, and instead of a Dark Lord, my villain was a ruthless drifter and supernatural madman named Randall Flagg. The land of Mordor ("where the shadows lie, according to Tolkien) was played by Las Vegas.”
King originally had to cut the book significantly. In 1990, he released The Stand: The Complete & Uncut Edition, which both restored lost material and added new parts (particularly a new ending). Later, the novel was adapted in a four-part ABC mini-series in 1994; it starred Gary Sinise, Molly Ringwald, Rob Lowe, and Jamey Sheridan.
Reverberations of The Stand have echoed in pop culture since its release. The Alarm’s single, “The Stand”, as well as Anthrax’s “Among the Living” were inspired by the book. The producers of Lost have repeatedly indicated that King, especially The Stand, are primary influences on their material.
As far as King’s own work, characters, themes and locations from The Stand continued to appear in his work. Long-time readers know the eventual significance of Flagg in a number of stories, including The Dark Tower. The world itself would briefly be revisited in The Dark Tower IV: Wizard and Glass.
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