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La Tour is a graphic novel by Belgian comic artists François Schuiten and Benoît Peeters, the third volume of their ongoing Les Cités Obscures series. It was first published in serialized form in the Franco-Belgian comics magazine À Suivre (#96-106), and as a complete volume first in 1987 by Casterman. In English, it was published as The Tower (Stories of the Fantastic) in 1993 by NBM Publishing, and as The Tower in 2022 in a new translation by IDW Publishing.

Background

The time is about 400 AT (After the Tower), which is the number of years since the Tower's ongoing construction has begun. As the story takes place centuries before the other Obscure Cities albums, The Tower exhibits the least connection to steampunk fiction out of the entire series. Instead, the Tower's design, architecture, and clothing show Medieval influences of time periods between the 10th and the 15th centuries, particularly technology and architecture of the segue between Medieval Gothic art and the early Renaissance period, as well as Pre-Romanesque, Romanesque, Gothic, and early Renaissance art. The technology used is therefore more reminiscent of clockpunk.

The main character, Giovanni Battista, is explicitly named after Giovanni Battista Piranesi, whose Imaginary Prisons series of etchings is cited as the main influence on the book's artwork.^[1]^: 105 Schuiten illustrated Battista based on Orson Welles playing Falstaff in Chimes at Midnight.^[2] The IDW edition of the book makes the further claim that, during the creative process for The Tower, Welles personally posed as a live model for Schuiten's artwork, though this story is "collected by Isidore Louis," a fictional archivist, and likely gestures at the meta narrative Schuiten and Peeters have crafted around The Obscure Cities themselves being real.^[1]^: 108

Plot

Giovanni Battista delivers a theatrical monologue, foreshadowing the story to come.

Giovanni has been employed for many years as one of many maintainers of an enormous stone edifice called only the Tower, permanently stationed alone within one part of its frame, where he is responsible for repairing failing masonry by perilously navigating beams and columns. Even as Giovanni diligently performs his job, working long days with little rest and leaving himself disheveled, he notices that his fellow maintainers and the inspectors overseeing them have abandoned their duties. Unable to keep up with a mounting rate of failures, he decides to lodge complaints with his superiors at the Base of the Tower.

Climbing down, Giovanni finds one maintainer who has succumbed to paranoia, and another long dead. He builds a parachute to safely descend the tower, but is carried higher by an updraft. After crash-landing, he is rescued by an older man named Elias and a younger woman named Milena, who reside in a newer, bustling community of Tower-dwellers. Elias earns money by charging admission to learn about the Tower from his collection of books, artifacts, and paintings. The paintings, which purport to depict the nobility residing at the Base, the Pioneers still at work constructing the Tower at its top, as well as the Tower's past and future, are the first coloured artwork thus far among otherwise black-and-white line art.

Elias, who believes that the Tower's deterioration is accelerating and that its very conception was unplanned and misguided, teaches Giovanni all he knows about the Tower and prophesies that Giovanni will discover the Tower's secret at its top. Milena is charmed by the romantically inexperienced Giovanni, and they fall in love. Together, she and Giovanni use a secret passage to glimpse the centre of the Tower, a dark void of unknown depth; Milena resolves to leave with Giovanni on his prophesied journey.

Sent by Elias on a forbidden path out of the community, Giovanni and Milena travel through myriad regions of the Tower, each abandoned in the ever-upward construction. They find a ransacked community full of corpses, and a lone survivor zealously guarding a machine that he cannot operate or explain. Finding even the very top of the Tower abandoned, Giovanni and Milena are left dispirited, but find solace in each other.

Angered by the Pioneers' desertion, Giovanni follows their trail down the hollowed centre of the Tower. Giovanni and Milena find heaps of hastily discarded valuables, but Giovanni notices that the Pioneers refused to part with their paintings, only leaving behind the empty frames. By operating a giant pulley, the two manage to descend the centre of the Tower; encountering Elias on their way down, Giovanni lies about the Pioneers to comfort him.

Reaching the bottom, Giovanni finds a coloured, torn scrap of a painting depicting a dying soldier, and is suddenly encouraged; Milena explains that Elias's paintings even have the power to heal the sick.

The two exit the Tower into a fully coloured world where they alone are drawn in black-and-white. An unidentified army forcibly conscripts them both into an ongoing battle. Though he has never seen the bayonets the soldiers carry, Giovanni quickly adapts to the fighting, and kills an enemy soldier, creating the same scene shown on the painting scrap. Giovanni rallies the soldiers on his side even as the sudden collapse of the Tower nearly routs their forces.

Giovanni briefly speaks of winning the battle and entering a new world, but stops his story out of sudden melancholy. Nothing is shown of subsequent events except a full-length, framed portrait of Giovanni, fully-coloured, groomed and in magisterial robes, accompanied by not Milena but a statue bearing her name.

Editions

In French

La Tour (softcover edition), 1987, Casterman
La Tour (hardcover edition), 1987, Casterman
La Tour, 1993, Casterman
La Tour, 2008, Casterman

In English

The Tower (Stories of the Fantastic), 1993, NBM Publishing
The Tower, 2022, IDW Publishing

References

^ ^a ^b Peeters, Benoît (w), Schuiten, François (a). The Tower (2022). San Diego, CA: IDW Publishing.
^ Dossier FRANCOIS SCHUITEN, in Reddition - Zeitschrift für Graphische Literatur, #32, 1998, p.22 (German)

External links

La Tour, a few annotated pictures from the album (French)
Series overview on A comprehensive review of the Obscure Cities series for English-speaking fans
Les Cités Obscures by Juliani Darius on The Continuity Pages

[IDW-1] Peeters, Benoît (w), Schuiten, François (a). The Tower (2022). San Diego, CA: IDW Publishing.

[2] Dossier FRANCOIS SCHUITEN, in Reddition - Zeitschrift für Graphische Literatur, #32, 1998, p.22 (German)

[1]

[2]

@@ Line 1: / Line 1: @@
+{{Short description|Graphic novel in Les Cités Obscures series}}
 [[Image:Tour comic.jpg|thumb|right|150px|''La Tour'', cover]]
-'''''La Tour''''' is a [[graphic novel]] by Belgian comic artists [[François Schuiten]] and [[Benoît Peeters]], the third volume of their ongoing ''[[Les Cités Obscures]]'' series. It was first published in serialized form in the [[Franco-Belgian comics]] magazine ''[[À Suivre]]'' (#96-106), and as a complete volume first in 1987 by [[Casterman]]. In English, it was published as ''The Tower (Stories of the Fantastic)'' in 1993 by [[NBM Publishing]].
+'''''La Tour''''' is a [[graphic novel]] by Belgian comic artists [[François Schuiten]] and [[Benoît Peeters]], the third volume of their ongoing ''[[Les Cités Obscures]]'' series. It was first published in serialized form in the [[Franco-Belgian comics]] magazine ''[[À Suivre]]'' (#96-106), and as a complete volume first in 1987 by [[Casterman]]. In English, it was published as ''The Tower (Stories of the Fantastic)'' in 1993 by [[NBM Publishing]], and as ''The Tower'' in 2022 in a new translation by [[IDW Publishing]].
 == Background ==
+[[File:Giovanni Battista Piranesi - Le Carceri d'Invenzione - Second Edition - 1761 - 03 - The Round Tower.jpg|thumb|right|upright|''The Round Tower'', plate III of Piranesi's ''Imaginary Prisons'' etchings, is an example of inspiration for ''The Tower'''s artwork.]]
+The time is about 400 AT (''After the Tower''), which is the number of years since the Tower's ongoing construction has begun. As the story takes place centuries before the other ''Obscure Cities'' albums, ''The Tower'' exhibits the least connection to [[steampunk]] fiction out of the entire series. Instead, the Tower's design, architecture, and clothing show Medieval influences of time periods between the 10th and the 15th centuries, particularly technology and architecture of the segue between Medieval [[Gothic art]] and the early [[Renaissance]] period, as well as [[Pre-Romanesque art and architecture|Pre-Romanesque]], [[Romanesque art|Romanesque]], [[Gothic art|Gothic]], and early [[Renaissance]] art. The technology used is therefore more reminiscent of [[clockpunk]].
+The main character, Giovanni Battista, is explicitly named after [[Giovanni Battista Piranesi]], whose ''[[Imaginary Prisons]]'' series of etchings is cited as the main influence on the book's artwork.<ref name="IDW">{{cite comic | writer=[[Benoît Peeters|Peeters, Benoît]] | artist=[[François Schuiten|Schuiten, François]] | Title=The Tower | date=2022 | publisher=[[IDW Publishing]] | location=[[San Diego|San Diego, CA]] }}</ref>{{rp|105}} Schuiten illustrated Battista based on [[Orson Welles]] playing [[Falstaff]] in ''[[Chimes at Midnight]]''.<ref>''Dossier FRANCOIS SCHUITEN'', in ''Reddition - Zeitschrift für Graphische Literatur'', #32, 1998, p.22 '''(German)'''</ref> The IDW edition of the book makes the further claim that, during the creative process for ''The Tower'', Welles personally posed as a live model for Schuiten's artwork, though this story is "collected by Isidore Louis," a fictional archivist, and likely gestures at the meta narrative Schuiten and Peeters have crafted around The Obscure Cities themselves being real.<ref name="IDW"/>{{rp|108}}
-As the story takes place in the ancient history of the ''Obscure World'', ''La Tour'' is the one ''Les Cités Obscures'' album exhibiting the least connection to [[steampunk]] fiction. Instead, The Tower's design, architecture, and clothing show strong Medieval influences of time periods between the 10th and the 15th centuries, particularly [[Pre-Romanesque art and architecture|Pre-Romanesque]], [[Romanesque art|Romanesque]], [[Gothic art|Gothic]], and early [[Renaissance]] art. The technology used is therefore more reminiscent of [[clockpunk]].
 == Plot ==
+Giovanni Battista delivers a theatrical [[monologue]], foreshadowing the story to come.
-We are introduced to Giovanni Battista (whose visual appearance Schuiten based on [[Orson Welles]] playing [[Falstaff]] in ''[[Chimes at Midnight]]''<ref>''Dossier FRANCOIS SCHUITEN'', in ''Reddition - Zeitschrift für Graphische Literatur'', #32, 1998, p.22 '''(German)'''</ref>). Battista is a maintenance engineer in The Tower, a gigantic structure with many such engineers, each maintaining his own sector. The time is about 400 AT (''Age of The Tower''), which is the number of years since The Tower's ongoing construction has begun. Battista lives a solitary life alone in his sector, focused intently on his job and on following its established protocols. His world, like the graphic novel itself, is black and white. But over the years he loses contact with the other maintenance engineers and even with his superiors.  His repeated requests for a resupply of materials needed to repair the structure are seemingly ignored. Thus, Battista's sector begins to fall into decay.
+Giovanni has been employed for many years as one of many maintainers of an enormous stone edifice called only the Tower, permanently stationed alone within one part of its frame, where he is responsible for repairing failing masonry by perilously navigating beams and columns. Even as Giovanni diligently performs his job, working long days with little rest and leaving himself disheveled, he notices that his fellow maintainers and the inspectors overseeing them have abandoned their duties. Unable to keep up with a mounting rate of failures, he decides to lodge complaints with his superiors at the Base of the Tower.
-Worried about the increasingly decrepit state of his sector, Battista decides to leave his post and to inform his superiors in person. Although he begins the journey on foot, climbing down The Tower, he eventually builds a parachute to speed his descent. But the parachute is caught in an updraft, and Battista is taken even higher in The Tower. There he encounters an autonomous civilization whose technological and architectural level Schuiten locates exactly at the segue between Medieval [[Gothic art]] and the early [[Renaissance]] period. Like Battista, the inhabitants are following the protocols of the established bureaucracy, and patiently waiting for news from the base of The Tower while their sector decays. One inhabitant, Elias, has a collection of paintings. Unlike the rest of the graphic novel, these painting are in color, and Battista is fascinated by the scenes they depict: of nudity, of war, and most importantly of people motivated by their passions. Having failed to reach the base of The Tower, Battista decides to head upwards, intending to reach the top where pioneers and construction engineers are said to continually advance the building higher and higher.
+Climbing down, Giovanni finds one maintainer who has succumbed to paranoia, and another long dead. He builds a parachute to safely descend the tower, but is carried higher by an updraft. After crash-landing, he is rescued by an older man named Elias and a younger woman named Milena, who reside in a newer, bustling community of Tower-dwellers. Elias earns money by charging admission to learn about the Tower from his collection of books, artifacts, and paintings. The paintings, which purport to depict the nobility residing at the Base, the Pioneers still at work constructing the Tower at its top, as well as the Tower's past and future, are the first coloured artwork thus far among otherwise black-and-white line art.
-As Battista reaches the top, he comes upon the shocking revelation that The Tower's continuous construction was abandoned years before. The pioneers apparently left in a hurry, taking everything of value and discarding what was too heavy to carry. The trail of discarded belongings leads Battista to a gigantic [[winch]] that was presumably used to lower the pioneers through the hollow center of The Tower to its base. At the bottom, Battista finds piles of riches thrown haphazardly about and abandoned, partially obscuring the exit. Near a discarded picture frame he glimpses some color&mdash;what Battista mistakes for a painting is in fact the world outside The Tower.
+Elias, who believes that the Tower's deterioration is accelerating and that its very conception was unplanned and misguided, teaches Giovanni all he knows about the Tower and prophesies that Giovanni will discover the Tower's secret at its top. Milena is charmed by the romantically inexperienced Giovanni, and they fall in love. Together, she and Giovanni use a secret passage to glimpse the centre of the Tower, a dark void of unknown depth; Milena resolves to leave with Giovanni on his prophesied journey.
-Battista leaves The Tower behind and gets swept up in a raging war at its base. He kills for the first time in his life, and eventually helps to lead a band of soldiers to victory as The Tower collapses in the distance behind him. Battista makes a life for himself and rises to a position of some distinction, living happily ever after, but haunted by his memories of The Tower and by the stark contrast between its black-and-white world and the colorful life he now enjoys.
+Sent by Elias on a forbidden path out of the community, Giovanni and Milena travel through myriad regions of the Tower, each abandoned in the ever-upward construction. They find a ransacked community full of corpses, and a lone survivor zealously guarding a machine that he cannot operate or explain. Finding even the very top of the Tower abandoned, Giovanni and Milena are left dispirited, but find solace in each other.
+Angered by the Pioneers' desertion, Giovanni follows their trail down the hollowed centre of the Tower. Giovanni and Milena find heaps of hastily discarded valuables, but Giovanni notices that the Pioneers refused to part with their paintings, only leaving behind the empty frames. By operating a giant [[pulley]], the two manage to descend the centre of the Tower; encountering Elias on their way down, Giovanni lies about the Pioneers to comfort him.
+Reaching the bottom, Giovanni finds a coloured, torn scrap of a painting depicting a dying soldier, and is suddenly encouraged; Milena explains that Elias's paintings even have the power to heal the sick.
+The two exit the Tower into a fully coloured world where they alone are drawn in black-and-white. An unidentified army forcibly conscripts them both into an ongoing battle. Though he has never seen the [[bayonet]]s the soldiers carry, Giovanni quickly adapts to the fighting, and kills an enemy soldier, creating the same scene shown on the painting scrap. Giovanni rallies the soldiers on his side even as the sudden collapse of the Tower nearly routs their forces.
+Giovanni briefly speaks of winning the battle and entering a new world, but stops his story out of sudden melancholy. Nothing is shown of subsequent events except a full-length, framed portrait of Giovanni, fully-coloured, groomed and in magisterial robes, accompanied by not Milena but a statue bearing her name.
 == Editions ==
@@ Line 29: / Line 42: @@
 *''The Tower (Stories of the Fantastic)'', 1993, NBM Publishing
+*''The Tower'', 2022, IDW Publishing
+== References ==
+{{reflist}}
 == External links ==
@@ Line 34: / Line 51: @@
 * [https://web.archive.org/web/20051121201222/http://members.aol.com/IKONPress/html/section_1.html ''Series overview''] on ''[https://web.archive.org/web/20060109234930/http://members.aol.com/IKONPress/html/introduction.html A comprehensive review of the Obscure Cities series for English-speaking fans]''
 * [https://web.archive.org/web/20061023204655/http://www.sequart.com/citesobscures.htm ''Les Cités Obscures''] by Juliani Darius on [http://www.sequart.com/continuitypages/ The Continuity Pages]
-== References ==
-{{reflist}}
 {{LCO}}
 {{DEFAULTSORT:Tour (Comics)}}
-[[Category:Steampunk comics]]
+[[Category:1986 comics debuts]]
+[[Category:1987 graphic novels]]
+[[Category:Belgian comics titles]]
+[[Category:Comics set on fictional planets]]
+[[Category:Cultural depictions of Orson Welles]]
+[[Category:Fictional towers]]
+[[Category:IDW Publishing titles]]

v t e Les Cités obscures series
Creators	François Schuiten (artist) Benoît Peeters (writer)
Official series	Les murailles de Samaris (1983) La fièvre d'Urbicande (1985) La Tour (1987) La route d'Armilia (1988) Brüsel (1992) L'enfant penchée (1996) L'ombre d'un homme (1999) La frontière invisible (vol. 1: 2002; vol. 2: 2004) La Théorie du grain de sable (vol. 1: 2007; vol. 2: 2008)
Spin-offs	Le Mystère d'Urbicande (1985) L'archiviste (1987) L'Encyclopédie des transports présents et à venir (1988) Le Musée A. Desombres (1990) L'Écho des cités (1993) Souvenirs de l'Eternel présent (1993) Taxandria (1994) Mary la penchée (1995) Le Guide des cités (1996) L'etrange cas du docteur Abraham (2001) L'affaire Desombres (2002)