What's Black And White And Important All Over? This Graphic Novel About Weimar Berlin

​Before Nazism took hold of Berlin in the 30s, the city was an epicenter of culture and science. But it was also recovering from war and becoming increasingly and radically divided by extremism and politics. For twenty years, graphic novelist Jason Lutes painstakingly researched the era, the city, the people, and a culture's descent into the stranglehold of fascism. The result is a graphic novel so detailed, so well-executed that the NYT review compared its modernist techniques to that of Joyce's Ulysses.

It's told through different perspectives, including a struggling mother of three, an idealistic journalist, a cabaret dancer, and three generations of a Jewish family, among others. Watching the inevitable come to pass, as we know it will, watching the characters at first disbelieve then come to understand the extremist shift happening all around them, delivers a strong punch of relevance. But beyond that, Berlin is the gorgeous, detailed, meticulous result of twenty years of an artist at work.

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