Review by Karl Verhoven

The Spire is a massive city in the middle of the desert, an entity unto itself, so ancient it has places and passages long forgotten by most, and a melting pot for assorted races. Only Sha, Commander of the City Watch, is unique, and her skills and patience are tested as a succession of murders occur just as her protector the Baron dies and is replaced by his less compliant daughter.

Simon Spurrier is a writer who relishes words more than many of his contemporaries, and The Spire is rich with phrases like “indeed yes, poor hag, our dolorous need is the addict’s grim hunger only funding can feed” or “your breath is a leprous lungfart”. There’s plenty more like that, and perhaps the only problem with such cleverness is that admiring it distracts the attention from a complex plot requiring concentration. Keep in mind that despite her grumpy nature, we like Sha, and all others are not to be trusted as she manoeuvres her way through them.

In addition to the work put into defining the characters and polishing the dialogue, Spurrier constructs a society analogous to our own, complete with entitlement, persecution and prejudice. And reflecting our own society, someone’s trying to agitate existing conditions for their own means.

Given the variety of people within the city and their uniforms and customs, Jeff Stokely has one hell of a job on his hands bringing it all to life, but he goes well beyond the call of duty with layouts maximising the possibilities of the Spire’s unwieldy bolted on look. He positively revels in showing the assorted nooks and crannies, and the sheer scale of the place, yet his loose style is also effective at transmitting feelings.

The Spire is long at almost two hundred pages, and possesses a considerable density. This isn’t a story to be rushed to the end, but one explicitly designed to be read leisurely, letting the details seep in before moving on. The joy is in the small details, figuring out how the society works, the relationships between people and indeed considering Sha herself. The pressure builds and builds until it bursts and the lesson is that the truth always comes out sometime in the future.

Fantasy, mystery or allegory, The Spire is a damn fine graphic novel, and having put all that effort in to create their world, it’s a shame Spurrier and Stokely never revisited it.