SI SPURRIER
When it comes to plots and story concepts, Si Spurrier doesn’t cotton to conventional, unimaginative or any other run-of-the-mill synonym for dull. Spurrier’s narratives possess dimension, sub-texts and sub-sub-texts, they’re optical illusions like a Necker cube or Rubin’s vase except, you know, with words and ideas. With Spurrier, a Sci-fi Western starring a sentient simian, Six-Gun Gorilla, turns out to be an exegesis on the power of fiction to affect change. In Numbercruncher, a street-wise cockney knuckle-dragger in a pinstripe suit and a bowler hat becomes the entrée into a dialogue about fate, karma, chaos, bookkeeping and the unruly persistence of love. For Spurrier it’s always ‘what if’ plus.
Spurrier’s esprit de mind-fuckery plays in the hippest clubs of (less) mainstream publishers like Titan Books and Boom! Studios as well as the big arenas too. Give credit to the TVA clock-punchers at Marvel who continue to see Spurrier’s genius to wrangle the multi-verse’s most infamous multiple-personality, David ‘Legion’ Haller — a legacy to the freewheelin’ Chris Claremont if ever there was one. A.V. Club critic Oliver Sava calls X-Men: Legacy ”Marvel’s best X-book [and] one of the most consistently strong superhero reads each month,” high praise from one of the sharpest and most well-informed critics writing about comics today.
Fiction functions as an anticipation engine, the proverbial ‘and then what happened.’ Spurrier has the innate sense to subvert clichéd expectations and add other unforeseen and unconventional layers of implication which is a wordy way to say: Spurrier’s got guts. It takes fortitude to muck about with a narrative’s rhythm in order to allow characters in the narrative to muse about the fortitude it takes to muck about with a narrative’s rhythm. Read the last sentence again; it’s a feeble attempt to out-Spurrier Spurrier, for sure, but it makes my point.
Gonzo storytelling is de rigueur nowadays. Spurrier goes one better with the self-awareness of a British clergyman like Laurence Sterne and the madcap laughs of a nerd’s nerd like Lewis Carroll. Yeah? Yeah.
– Keith Silva / CB