Berlin: 14

I started Jason Lutes' Berlin at issue 11, and then went back through the rest of them. I just finished 14, and it's getting pretty hard to keep track of what's going on. It's a weird story, there are a ton of characters and threads, some issues end with cliff hangers, some end with non sequiturs. The main threads are fascinating, and everything is underlined with the political tension in Berlin that surrounded the years of the Wiemar Republic and the rise of the Third Reich. When I first started reading it I found myself asking, "Why the hell did he want to write this?" and I'm not sure I'm any more able to answer that question at this point, but there is something incredibly shrewd and impressive about the book. Berlin is more interested in history than politics, and presents as even handed approach to the time period as one could imagine. Lutes also provides links to reference materials on his website. I love that a "cartoonist" is infinitely more researched and journalistic in his approach to a comic book than the makers of the "documentary" reviewed in the previous post.

Issue 15 comes out this month, and though the end of 14 left me pretty confused, I'll be looking forward to the next installment.

PS. While writing this post, I was watching The Bourne Identity, which I'd never seen, on a movie channel that my parents were getting for free for some reason, but it crapped out when it seemed like it was getting to the climactic scene. Fuck.