The Talisman: The Road of Trials #2 cover image

Young Jack Sawyer is a boy of two worlds:  our world and its parallel, a dangerous placed called the Territories.  Almost every person in our world has a counterpart in the Territories – a person called a “Twinner.”  Charged by his friend Speedy Parker, Jack must travel into the Territories to find the Talisman, a precious magical object that can save two women – Jack’s ailing mother, Lily, and her Twinner, ruler of the Territories, Queen Laura DeLoessian.

As The Talisman: The Road of Trials #2, opens, Morgan Sloat, the former business partner of Jack’s late father, plots with his Twinner, Morgan of Orris, against Jack.  Meanwhile, giving him a map, a trinket, and important instructions, Speedy sends Jack into the Territories.  However, Travellin Jack’s first stop is the Territories’ royal palace, where an enemy awaits him.

[This issue includes a four-page section in which Robin Furth talks about adapting The Talisman into a comic book.]

The comic book adaptation of The Talisman, the novel written by Stephen King (Salem’s Lot) and Peter Straub (Ghost Story) and originally published in 1984, continues to improve – rapidly so.  Series’ writer, Robin Furth (a former assistant to Stephen King), has quite a task on her hands – adapting this large novel (which I’ve never read) into a graphics-based storytelling medium, introducing the characters and concepts, AND telling a story with drama and suspense, and Furth is quite up to the task.  This series reads like the comic book version of a great road movie, complete with mysterious new places, helpful strangers, shadowy, menacing figures and the great unknown.

Readers will believe in the world artist Tony Shasteen builds.  His art conveys to the reader that the Territories is not only a place of exciting magical creatures and places, but also a world of imminent danger and sudden death.  The Talisman may be fiction, but Furth and Shasteen will make you believe that the wonder and danger of the Territories is real enough to excite your imagination and also freeze your blood.

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