La Tour (comics)

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.

Background

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 900s and the 1400s AD, particularly Pre-Romanesque, Romanesque, Gothic, and early Renaissance art. The technology used is therefore more reminiscent of clockpunk.

Plot

We are introduced to Giovanni Battista (whose visual appearance Schuiten based off Orson Welles playing Falstaff in Chimes at Midnight). Battista is a maintenance engineer in The Tower, a gigantic, solitary structure comprising at the same time a building, a city, and a state. The time is about 400 AT (Age of The Tower), which is the number of years since The Tower's ongoing construction has begun. After many hard-working, fruitful years, Battista loses personal and even mail contact with other maintenance engineers responsible for neighboring areas, he receives no more maintenance tools or materials. Thus, his area begins to increasingly fall into decay.

Worried about this recent development, Battista begins a journey to find other maintenance engineers. Even though he finds none of his colleagues, he comes across autonomous civilizations within The Tower he never even heard of whose technological and architectural level Schuiten locates exactly at the segue between Medieval Gothic art and the early Renaissance period. These thriving areas are but only few in an increasing state of decay that has befallen The Tower. Continually frustrated as he finds no other maintenance engineers, Battista begins to head upwards, intending to reach The Tower's top where pioneers and construction engineers are said to continually advance the building higher and higher.

As Battista reaches the top, he comes upon the shocking revelation that The Tower's continuous construction has been abandoned many years ago. He now attempts a seemingly endless decent from the top in order to escape The Tower on ground level, but eventually realizes that the only way out is through means of colorful paintings depicting The Tower and its construction as seen from the outside. These paintings, obvious copies and references to Brueghel's variations of the Tower of Babel, stand out very much for their color as the rest of The Tower's universe is held exclusively in black and white.

Stepping into the paintings, Battista leaves a finally collapsing Tower behind. Via passing a number of fake and authentic Barbizon school paintings by artists such as Eugène Delacroix, Gustave Courbet, and Jean-François Millet, he reaches (or, by his entering, creates) the alternate 19th century world of the Obscure Cities which from now on becomes the new home for the surviving citizens of The Tower, founding the various autonomous city-states the other albums of the series deal with, and the modern era of the Obscure World begins.

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

External links

• La Tour, a few annoted 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