Tower Dreams

Description

Published by Transfer of Power, Bristol May 2026
Written Designed and Printed by Richard Starzecki.
A nine page Riso printed Pink/Blue, Pink/Green, hand bound zine.
Signed on request. Limited run of 50.

When I first moved to Bristol, I was struck by the stark beauty and peculiar urban weirdness of the Cheese Lane Shot Tower. Built in 1969 for the fantastically named Sheldon Bush and Patent Shot Company Limited, it was originally used to produce lead shot for ammunition. By the late 1980s, it had fallen out of use as safer materials and new methods replaced it. Saved from demolition in the 1990s, it survives today as part of the central Bristol skyline, folded into a modern office development.

Once a landmark, it is now dwarfed by the surrounding architecture and detached from its original purpose—an industrial ghost. Despite this, it remains a singular presence, always fixed in my psychic map of the city. When sketching out the pages of Tower Dreams, it was inevitable that this strange structure would become the model for the tower.

That leads to The Watchtowers by J.G. Ballard (1962), a key inspiration for this comic. In Ballard’s story, an unnamed town becomes an eerie panopticon: smooth metal towers hang inexplicably in the sky, spaced across the city. Their inhabitants—mysterious “watchers”—look down over streets and rooftops with total visibility. The citizens, oddly unbothered, attempt to live normal lives beneath them.

I’ve always loved the image of those towers drifting in the clouds, quietly looming over everything. As with much of Ballard’s work, there’s an atmosphere of calm paranoia—leaving it unclear whether the towers are real or simply a projection of the protagonist’s mind.

I loved the story and wanted to riff on those eerie sky structures in my own way…

I hope you enjoy it.
Rz