Berlin: Page 207

So I just realized that I have not posted on Jason Lutes's Berlin: City of Stones yet. My first impressions of this graphic novel were good- I enjoy the fact that the narrative skips around so frequently, and I feel like I can open the book to nearly any page and get an overall perception of what is happening and how Lutes wants his readers to understand the overall aura of the place and time.

Reading through the end of the book, I was particularly interested in the transitions used on page 207. While I do not have McCloud's book in front of me at the moment, I believe that Lutes uses an aspect-to-aspect transition in the first two panels, action-to-action transitions in the middle panels, and moment-to-moment transitions to end the page.

This creative use of transitions creates a dynamic effect in which the reader, through the transitions, experiences the way that the situation begins to slow down for the man who is shot when he realizes he is dying. The page begins with chaos (aspect-to-aspect), slows down a bit once the man realizes he is shot (action-to-action transitions depicting the man falling), and slows to a crawl as we experience the man's death from his own visual perspective (moment-to-moment).

The way the paneling begins to disappear as the man dies (and the following pages) gives the reader the impression that Lutes's story does not end here, creating interest in any coming graphic novels. I also appreciated the creative use of paneling in which the man's head is separated from the portion of his body with the bullet wound. This is as if to say the man cannot believe he has actually just been shot; the deadly physical nature of the situation is not, at first, believable. This makes the following action on the page even more dramatic.