Devastatingly relevant and beautifully told, Berlin is one of the great epics of the comics medium. Berlin: City of Stones presents the first part of Jason Lutes' captivating trilogy, set in the twilight years of Germany's Weimar Republic.Kurt Severing, a journalist, and Marthe Muller, an art student, are the central figures in a broad cast of characters intertwined with the historical events unfolding around them. Weimar Berlin was the world s metropolis, where intellectualism, creativity, and sensuous liberal values thrived, and Lutes maps its tragic, inevitable decline. Lavish salons, crumbling sidewalks, dusty attics, and train stations: all these places come alive in Lutes masterful hand. The city itself is the central protagonist in this historical fiction. Lutes weaves these characters lives into the larger fabric of a city slowly ripping apart. Berlin is an intricate look at the fall of the Weimar Republic through the eyes of its citizens?Marthe Muller, a young woman escaping the memory of a brother killed in World War I, Kurt Severing, an idealistic journalist losing faith in the printed word as fascism and extremism take hold the Brauns, a family torn apart by poverty and politics. Serialized in twenty-two issues, collected in two volumes, with a third to be released at the same time as this omnibus, Berlin has more than 100,000 copies in print and is one of the high-water marks of the medium: rich in its well-researched historical detail, compassionate in its character studies, and as timely as ever in its depiction of a society slowly awakening to the stranglehold of fascism. During the past two decades, Jason Lutes has quietly created one of the masterworks of the graphic novel golden age.
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