Hear ye now the tale of Roland son of Steven, Roland of Gilead, newly minted Gunslinger at the tender age of fourteen dispatched on a mission by his father to secure horses and learn of the progress of Farson's plans against the Affiliation.

In the first issue we encountered Roland practicing with Cort and the other potentials, the potential Gunslingers who if tested will become full fledged Gunslingers-- tested by defeating Cort, their teacher and weapons masters in combat.

We also met Marten, a man, a creature of many names and great evil who has been carrying on an affair with Gabrielle, Roland's mother and the wife of Steven Deschain. Martin deliberately exposes Roland to the affair and in doing so drives Roland to claim his guns by testing against Cort. The weapon he uses is his trained hawk. Roland visits a prostitute before preparing to carry out the second half of his plan and murder Marten, when he is woken by Steven Deschain, who warns him that he has "forgotten the face of his father".

Steven reveals that he is well aware of the affair being carried on between Marten and Gabrielle and sends Roland along with several of the potentials on a mission to scout out Farson's doings in the east and to the Barony of Mejis to purchase horses for the affiliation from Pat Delgado. Here "The Gunslinger Born #2" intersects directly with the fourth novel in the Dark Tower series, "Wizard and Glass", even reproducing some of the same scenes in both-- particularly when it comes to Susan Delgado.

Meanwhile back in Gilead, Marten communes with The Crimson King, who unlike his appearance in the final novel of the Dark Tower series, the eponymous "The Dark Tower", is displayed as a great deformed man-spider dwelling in the depths of a red castle decorated with blood and corpses. The Crimson King commands Marten to insure that Roland dies and never becomes a threat to him, grousing that Marten's plot to destroy Roland only accelerated the fulfillment of the prophecy.

Steven Deschain sends armed men to rest Marten but Marten transforms them into dogs and uses magic to depart to another world, escaping justice, until he eventually reappears again in Gilead and on our world and as The Man in Black. The plot of course moves with the transportation of the "Glass" of "Wizard and Glass". The glass is one of the thirteen of Maerlyn's Rainbow. Maerlyn was a powerful creature of the void who took human form and as Prometheus gave fire to man, Maerlyn taught them the uses of magic and then taught them to use it destroy themselves.

The Affiliation exists in the shadow of the war Maerlyn brought about, which nearly destroyed the Tower and the realm of the Imperium as well as opening 'Thinnies', gateways for creatures from the void, the prim, to enter human worlds and wreak havoc there. The Crimson King is himself a product of Maerlyn's assault on the realm of Gilead when it was young and Arthur Eid was its newly crowned king. Maerlyn brought The Crimson Queen, a demoness, to seduce Arthur Eid. Like Roland's own son by a demoness, Mordred-- the result is an inhuman manspider creature of pure evil.

Like Sauron giving the Rings of Power to elves, dwarves and mortal men, Maerlyn -- greatest of all the creatures of the void-- crafted these thirteen spheres to form a rainbow. The spheres possess various powers, but like the Rings of Power, they ultimately warp whoever possesses them. In Issue 2, The Crimson King sends the 'Grapefruit' sphere to Rhea, a witch in the Barony of Mejis in Hambry, where she sees in it Roland and his companions, his Ka Tet riding in.

Susan Delgado, daughter of Pat Delgado who had been murdered by the Big Coffin Hunters and whose aunt had pressured her into marrying the Mayor goes into the swamp to the witch to be examined by her, to test whether she's a virgin and whether she's been contaminated by contact with demons. She also hypnotizes Susan with a hidden command. All this duplicates material in "Wizard and Glass" and directly overlaps with it, but this is entirely reasonable as the Gunslinger comic series is meant to cover Roland's missing years taking him from Gilead to his fateful encounter at the Barony of Mejis and beyond into the War with Farson (The Good Man) and the Fall of Gilead, culminating with Roland's final undying mission- his quest for the Dark Tower.

Issue 2 ends with the first encounter between Roland and Susan, his doomed love and the young warrior just ascended into a premature adulthood. The notes also provide us with the story of the mythology behind the Dark Tower series, the rise of the Crimson King, the prophecy of the coming of the Gunslinger Roland, the tale of Maerlyn's Rainbow-- whose spheres are once more abroad and causing havoc in the world and the Big Coffin Hunters with their shining stars and evil hearts, murderous and cunning, preparing for a showdown they do not yet know has already come.

Maerlyn had already wrought the fall of the first human civilization and now he plots to bring the second one down as well. With the work of the Crimson King, Arthur Eid's damned descendant and through the hand of his servant, Marten-- against them must rise to stand Roland of the line of Eid.