Posted in: Comics | Tagged: boom, Comics, entertainment, Jeff Stokely, omics, si spurrier, spire

The Spire – A Medieval Mutant Mega-City Block Of Murder…

It does feel as it Spire has been coming a long time. Medieval

Written by Si Spurrier, it does in some ways appear to be a merging of his greatest hits. His work on 2000AD, and the Mega City Blocks, wherein one can spend their whole life, with a police force often out of its depth, meting out judgement along the way.

Then there's the idea of mutation that he has been playing with in X-Men Legacy and X-Force, the inventive names and nomenclatures for such types and the intolerance to something different.

Add the rich, separate and comprehensive world of Gutsville, his truncated Image series with Frazer Irving.

There's even a nod to Doctor Who, the comic he is currently writing for Titan, in that anyone who says that they are the last of their kind, are not. They simply don't know any better.

And of course Six Gun Gorilla, if only that it was also drawn by the artist of Spire, Jeff Stokely. And dealt with weird military types, structures of authority and dropping lots of weird shit into semi-recognisable structures. And with colourist André May, Stokely brings that sense of cohesion stunningly to this book, joining the world together, even as Steve Wand's lettering does its best to delineate things.

Then what you have is somewhere between a Block and a Tower Of Babel, with so many dfferent types of people and things and things-which-are-also-people. So many races living side by side, or rather above and below. This is Babylon-5, this is Ankh-Morpokh, this is South London tipped on its side, with people, mutants, skews, flying gargoyle, sentient fungus finding a way to get along in a hard and cruel world with some semblance of order from above.

Si Spurrier clearly has the world fully planned out and he deigns to give us small slices. And told mostly from the point of view of Commander Sha, a senior, one eyed, white haired, lesbian "skew" who has jellyfish-like tentacles that grow out of the space between her shoulder blades. There are those below her, there are those above her.

Literally in some cases.

And she has to toe the thin blue line, what is expected of her from the rulers, from the population in their social strata and what she has to do in order to live with herself.

And amongst all this examination of the Spire and those who live in and on it, it is not too insular. There is an outside where people go to, even if they often try to ignore it for its dangers and unpredictability. But there's also the idea that stuff is happening there – and has been for decades. And it's going to want to have its share.

For more from Si Spurrier, I guess we'll have to wait for Image Expo tonight…

Spire is published by Boom! Studios. Issue 1 came our yesterday.

Enjoyed this? Please share on social media!

Stay up-to-date and support the site by following Bleeding Cool on Google News today!