The Road to the Tower: The Stunning Literary Art of Michael Whelan

Over ten years ago, alone in my middle school’s library I picked up one of my first Stephen King novels. It was about a revolver-wielding knight-errant who lived in a world that seemed to be a supernatural, post-apocalyptic version of our own, populated with demons, ghosts, mutants, cults, Old West saloons singing “Hey Jude,” and talking to automated handrail carts that once belonged to a long dead, extremely advanced civilization. He was after a man in black who potentially held the answers to getting to a soot dark tower at the center of all existence, a place he would forsake any and all to reach. “The Gunslinger” was the title of this book, the first in “The Dark Tower” series, and that tower is the one you see in the picture just above, and in the foreground is the eponymous gunslinger.

This series was instrumental in my literary upbringing, no doubt making me love strange mashups of sci-fi, fantasy, horror, and urban fiction, and no doubt instrumental in making me read these books in the first place was Michael Whelan’s cover art for the series. The portrait I have placed above is probably the most iconic of the paintings he made for this story. It shows so few pieces of the story but they’re all you need to get the themes and scope of this epic. The wide open, setting sun sky, the sheer enormity of the Tower, it speaks to a scale so much larger than life so as to overshadow the universe (nudge nudge, wink wink). Our wounded warrior at the forefront shows both the seriousness of the quest before us as well as the anachronistic nature of the tale. This wouldn’t be the piece that introduced me to the series though.

This would be the one to do that. It’s the cover art to some of the earliest editions of the first book, and it was just mystifying to me. The eerie sunset juxtaposed against the classic, archetypal western warrior, with the Tower, at the time a tower that was a total mystery to me, just barely visible, thus showing to be always present in the story, even if not always mentioned. This particular portrait is just one version of it, the original one I saw was a vista of a beautiful sunset, not unlike the one in the first, but this one works just as well. The world of the gunslinger would have a sunset like that, almost miasma-like in its quality, as the world he inhabits has gone wrong, “moved on” as he puts it. Whelan knew what King was going for in his world, and knew how to show it.

The horror, the heart-stopping battle imagery, the emotion on the character’s faces, the brutal hideousness of the slow mutants. I remember reading this part, a journey through the Cyclopean Mountains, the dark all-encompassing, oppressive, disorienting, the mutants appearing and becoming a wave of flesh, blood, and eldritch terror, prepared to drag one into the pitch. Tell me this piece doesn’t capture that perfectly, I dare you. I was so surprised that this was a part of some editions, Whelan so wonderfully took the fear straight from my mind’s eye and put it out into the world. Though don’t think he’s just a one trick pony, Whelan has done work for a myriad of authors, or even just for himself.

A painting of his own titled “Armenia.”

His own interpretation of Gollum from “The Lord of the Rings.”

One of his most famous pieces, the cover art for Brandon Sanderson’s “The Way of Kings.”

He’s even done art for album covers, including Meat Loaf’s “Bat Out of Hell II.”

What I’m trying to get across is for you to look this guy up. He’s talented, innovative, he knows how to create the tone and lore for a whole world in just one image. Michael Whelan is one of the true illustrators of a lot of great pop culture moments, and he deserves to be remembered for it.