La Tour (comics)

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.

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, Romanesque, Gothic, and early Renaissance art. The technology used is therefore more reminiscent of clockpunk.

We are introduced to Giovanni Battista (whose visual appearance Schuiten based on Orson Welles playing Falstaff in Chimes at Midnight). 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.

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