More and more people living in cities, urban life stories are the subject of countless successful novels, films and comics. The famous woodcuts by Frans Masereel, impressive testimonies of the human condition in the big cities during the interwar period, are the starting point of the exhibition «Big City Life» at the Cartoonmuseum in Basel. It brings together the original works of twelve well-known comic book authors from Europe and the United States who focus on urban life. The selection ranges from classic cartoonists like Art Spiegelman, Will Eisner and Lorenzo Mattotti to younger talents like Gabriella Giandelli, Yann Kebbi or Christoph Niemann. The exhibition focuses on the diversity of forms and topics presented by different contemporary comic book authors. To the originality and variety of the way artists look at life in the big city corresponds the diversity of the works: they celebrate the city as a laboratory of modernity and stigmatize it as a place of vice, despair of its anonymity, discover the village, show its chaos and reveal its poetry.