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The Spire #1

Simon Spurrier is a novelist and comic writer whose work includes X-Force, six gun Gorilla, X-Men Legacy, The Simping Detective, and more. Now, he teams with artist Jeff Stokely for the new series, The Spire, from BOOM! Studios. Westfield’s Roger Ash got in touch with Spurrier to learn much more about this upcoming book.

Westfield: What was the genesis of the series and how much world building did you do?

Simon Spurrier: Genesis grew from the easy desire to collaborate with Jeff again. I gave some thought to the sorts of stuff we both really enjoy—our commonalities of taste, basically—and then just leaned as hard as I could into them all. It felt like a smart way to proceed, y’know? I wanted this project to be something we both felt passionate about, so that Venn-diagram of excitement was an essential thing to visualise. In the case of The Spire the most significant overlaps are nebulous things to finish with creation, exoticism, crime, and culture, but I guess if you want the easy version they break down like this: Blade Runner! Dark Crystal! mad Max! 

That’s The Spire.

I’m being glib—there’s certainly way much more to it than that. but that’s pretty explicitly how it emerged. A desire to tell an intimate, crimey, hard-boiled story in a completely crazy and entirely distinct world. We had such fun world-building for Six-Gun Gorilla we knew we could do that stuff without any boundaries, so we sort of set ourselves an even higher goal. It wasn’t enough to simply create an remarkable and original universe, it also had to feel functional, y’know? Lived-in. We wanted to create a world which didn’t feel like it simply disappeared the moment we, or our readers, looked away from it. That sounds crazy, but you’d be impressed at how numerous sci-fi or fantasy worlds exist purely to prop up a single story, or a single McGuffin at the heart of that story. With The Spire we’ve set out to make an amazing and fascinating place, then we’ve changed our focus onto characters and stories which are even more incredible and even much more fascinating. For all its awesomeness, if we’ve done our jobs best the world ought to feel like the least interesting part of the package.

The Spire #1 preview page 1

Westfield: As you mentioned, you are once again teaming with artist Jeff Stokely. What can you say about your collaboration with him?

Spurrier: It’s a joy. Comics writers often spend their whole careers waiting for an artist to come along who not only understands what they’re trying to do on an intuitive level, but then takes it to the next level. Jeff’s work on Six-Gun Gorilla took everyone by surprise and forged a partnership we intend to revisit as numerous times as we can. this time round I’ve insisted Jeff and I share an equal ownership of the project, and it’s led to a really cool creative dynamic. For instance, I catch myself leaving deliberate gaps in the script where Jeff is invited to create a new race of beings, a new type of technology, a new architecture; whatever it may be, which I then go back and absorb into the tale. It’s the most reactive—and many rewarding—process I’ve ever been part of.

The Spire #1 preview page 2

Westfield: who are the main characters involved in the book?

Spurrier: I don’t want to spoil too much, but the clear protagonist is a amazing woman called Shå. She’s the commander of a civilian police-force in a mind-boggling city: the eponymous Spire. It’s a mile-high megastructure, ancient and exhausted, which juts from the desert of a timeless wilderness. The last refuge of humanity—and of far stranger beings. Shå herself isn’t entirely human, and on top of the day-to-day pressures of her life—brutal murders, bureaucratic corruption, insidious conspiracies slowly oozing into the light, mischievous lover—she has to deal with the deep vein of xenophobic intolerance which infects the city. She’s riddled with secrets of her own—many of them beyond even her own recollection—and rapidly finds herself embroiled in something deep, dark and deadly.

Other characters range from the aristocratic bluebloods who govern the Spire to the cackling, miniature fart-propelled messengers called Gargs, amongst whom we find Pug: one of Shå’s deputies.

Part of the charm of a tale like The Spire is that we never really felt it had the need to self-identify as purely “sci-fi” or “fantasy” or “apocalyptic” or whatever. There are elements of all those things, but so much more. We figured that pigeonholing ourselves in that way would only ever restrict our creativity, when there’s simply no need to do so. even the most non-human of our characters are, emotionally speaking, as human as it’s possible to get. just to labor my point: This isn’t a story about an amazing world, it’s a story about some astonishing but very familiar-feeling characters which just happens to be set in one.

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Westfield: What can readers look forward to in the story?

Spurrier: Oh, y’know. The usual. Murder, lunatic desert guerrillas, mutant races, program change, rhyming gangsters, an ancient WMD, a mystery at the heart of government, a killer on the loose, a racial vendetta, sexy funtimes, coffee and bacon, beetlewing fart-propulsion, flesh reshaping weirdness, and a cackling forest goddess. and that’s just in episode one.

Westfield: any closing comments?

Spurrier: happy STANDS THE SPIRE!

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The Spire #1