The Spire

Simon Spurrier and Jeff Stokely launched The Spire through BOOM! Studios in 2015. Sha, commander of the city's watch, pursues a killer while a new Baroness is about to take power.

The Spire itself is a vertical settlement of forgotten technology and new biology. The investigation moves through its communities, making social divisions as important as clues.

The eight-issue series gives detective fiction an unusually dense fantasy-science setting. Solving a crime requires understanding how the city is built and who is allowed to belong.

Its mystery works because the tower's institutions are unstable. Every discovery has a political consequence in a place whose inhabitants already distrust one another.

Old machinery and altered life coexist after an implied catastrophe. The radioactive desert keeps the city enclosed, turning its architecture into a system of survival.

The speculative elements are deliberately hybrid. Their role is to make difference, prejudice, and inherited conflict concrete inside one towering habitat.

Stokely's varied figures and stacked spaces make the vertical city easy to feel. Every level suggests another population and another pressure point.

The linework balances grotesque invention with readable detective action. The setting is crowded, but the investigation always has a path through it.