That was one dense story. I'm not going to say there was great world building here, because to be great it would need to be better explained and less obtuse. But it was interesting, I just constantly felt like I skipped a page. A lot didn't quite connect and required a leap in logic.

Like many of my favorite mysteries, The Spire piles multiple layers onto the whodunit, until the identity of the murderer is just one of several questions whose answers I eagerly awaited. Personal and political issues are always closer together than they seem, and everything hurtles at breakneck speed toward the conclusion.Unfortunately, I disliked the conclusion it reached. The identity of the killer was unsatisfying in both fact and form of revelation; the political intrigue turned into overwr...

It was really good and interesting and then the last chapter happened.

By the last page, The Spire had become one of my fave science fiction comics, fave fantasy comics, and fave queer comics all rolled into one. It's part police procedural, part political conspiracy, and has significant commentary on discrimination, so there is possibly no way it could be any better for me. It follows Sha, a queer woman (and the last of her species) who's Commander of the City Watch in The Spire, as she tries to solve a series of murders while a new leader of the city is about to

I'm a fan of stories that capture well the conflicts of insiders versus outsiders, and this fantasy/dystopian graphic novel hits all my sweet spots.In the midst of a radioactive desert, on a mountain of steel and stone, there is a vast city, home to humans and non-humans, and everyone has secrets. Murders, mysteries, political machinations, and secrets. Oh, so many secrets. This is a fun romp of a read that explores interesting themes, and the art is really good as well. I enjoyed the world buil...

Interesting story and characters, but I do wish the actual world was fleshed out more.

I was weary of this story. It had a promising start, and it delivers, for the most part. It holds the title of an intriguing story, until the last issue happened, which left me conflicted on what to make of the entire thing. I am still unsure if I liked the tone it took, or if I thought it too easy. The magic that originally drew me to it was still there. The power dynamics left as ingrained in society without question, from the way people view Sculpted, to the way the city is constructed with a...

Normally I'm a big fan of Spurrier, but this one didn't quite work for me. Part of it is that whereas his other Boom! fantasy series, Coda, takes classic fantasy elements and then massively fucks with them, this one starts out with a slightly more slipstream setting, but then plays it fairly straight. The eponymous Spire is a Heath-Robinson steampunk marvel standing in the middle of a wasteland which is poisonous to humans, but habitable to the Sculpted – or as they're more derogatorily known, '...

I wasn't too sure about this at the beginning, felt a little bit too "dropped into the middle of the story" and "whoah, this was written by a man" (the latter sentiment I still stand by). But, the world building picks up eventually (though there could've totally been more) and by then I was fully on board. It follows a lesbian 'sculpted' Head of Police through a very convoluted murder mystery, part of which seems to tie to her own question mark of a past. The artwork was a huge selling point for...

4.5/5An excellent (weird) fantasy graphic novel.You'll enjoy it if you're into:+ great, head-strong characters+ weird and seductive world-building (well, you get a fart-propelling messenger. Yes, You've heard right.)+ conical cities that are a sort of visual analogue for the class system+ deeply personal stakes+ great artAny issues? Well, perhaps some readers would like answers or an idea where all of it is going earlier. That said, I think it's great as it is.

Let me just open by saying, WOW!!!This science fiction comic blew my socks off, and the key reason for this is the way writer Simon Spurrier and artist Jeff Stokely have handled the key task of world building in this work. They have constructed both conceptually and visually a fully functional world that seemingly lives and breathes on its own, yet have also managed to avoid the pitfalls many work focusing on world building fall into, the least of which is not presenting the world created at the...

This is great, from the story, to the world-building, to the artwork. "Blade Runner meets The Dark Crystal with a dash of Mad Max." That's as good a description as anything else.

A metahuman sheriff in an unstable fantasy world must solve a series of political murders before a devastating war breaks out. This is dense with politics, spies, ethnic cleansing, a thirty-year old mystery, looming war, and bona fide heroic flying fart goblins. (I couldn't make that up.)Stellar. The Spire starts slow but by the end I couldn't put it down. I was up FAR too late last night because I had to watch the conspiracy unravel (or not), the genocidal religious warriors wipe out the innoce...

I really liked this book. I loved the way that they just threw you into this fantasy/science fiction world, no explanation, you just had to figure out on the run. The characters were interesting and fleshed out enough for the cross genre of noir detective story. I love the art work. It reminded me a lot of Mobius and really set the pace for the sort of grubby, complicated world that these people lived in. The different designs for the sculpted were really neat, everyone had that sort of ugly but...

I really wanted to like this more than I did. It was definitely an interesting world with interesting characters, but there was just so much going on that I constantly felt like I was missing something. A lot of the creatures / aspects of the world were not really explained at all the mystery resolution seemed incredibly convoluted to me. The art was nice and I did like parts of it, but it was incredibly dense and I just felt like I struggled a lot to get through it.

This was a good "adult" comic, so I feel you may see the 3 star rating and think "Why waste my time?", but the simple truth is that based on what I've read the past few weeks I have to go: Saga, Vol. 6 > Monstress, Vol. 1: Awakening > The Spire.Is it a humblebrag of some kind to state that the fact that this comic features a queer protagonist doesn't really affect my opinion of it one way or the other? I know the comics industry has had its well-documented struggles with diversity pretty much th...

This book is fantastic. Wow. I really wasn't expecting such a tight, well paced story. The art is stunning and perfect for the world, and the characters are brought to life incredibly well. This is a great read.

Heavy lore - intense world-building - deep character development.All things I like. Except I had a really hard time slogging through it. I think this is mostly based on the principle of me just not understanding what the fuck was going on.I don't know if it's because I have a case of the dumbs (I do) or the story just being too damn convoluted. There would be pages where I was completely engrossed and engaged with what was going on and then, suddenly, I had no fucking clue what was what.Despite

One of the worse reactions you can have to the reveal of a killer in a murder-mystery is ... "Who?" And I'm afraid to say I had that reaction to The Spire. I probably wouldn't have if I'd read it all in one day, but it was so dense ... Still, with a little page-flipping I managed to figure it out.Other than that, this is a fine graphic novel. It excels best at its creation of an evocative world that feels like something straight out of Heavy Metal, both because of its post-apocalyptic tropes and...

The world is much more interesting than the plot.