There's no linear narrative at all here. All one hundred panels are individual and don't really have any direction relation to any other panels, other than the people and events being depicted are taking place in the same city. There's enough distinction in some panels that you can tell they're not all taking place simultaneously -- some are clearly in the morning, some during the day, some in the evening -- but I think it's safe to assume they all take place around the same time. We don't see any different seasons or obvious passages of time beyond the vague morning/daytime/evening breakdown. I actually get the impression that Masereel's intent here is to show every day; that everything we see depicted is a more or less daily occurence.
Masereel is using the book to tell the story of a city. Not the specifics of how it was built or its history, not the unique nature and culture of any one city in particular, but rather the general character of cities in the early 1920s. Recall that in 1925, cities as we know them today were pretty rare. Skyscrapers as a concept had only been around a few decades and it really wasn't until the 1920s that they started getting built up regularly. The Empire State Building wasn't begun until 1930. So what Masereel was presenting with The City was what life in a 20th century city was like. This wasn't out in the country and this wasn't a city out of old Europe. This was a glimpse of the future for most people.
It's for this reason, I think, that Masereel opted to showcase the city as a series of one-panel vignettes. Each panel depcits a scene that is seemingly typical of daily life in the city. Hundreds of people rushing on their way to work. Weddings. Funerals. Street festivals. Shopping. Museums. Everything that you would recognize now as part of any city.
And I do mean everything.
A man is hit by a speeding car. A dead woman is fished out of the river. A wealthy man in expensive clothes obliviously strides past a homeless beggar. Some men get in a drunken fight. Domestic violence. Poverty. Blight. Pollution. Congestition. Masereel doesn't sugar coat any of it.
In fact, I daresay he almost takes an anti-city stance. I can't seem to find any summaries that explictly note his point of view on cities in general, only that he was heavily influenced by earlier parts of his life living in Paris and Berlin. He does depict the city's nicer points -- one of the later panels showcases a massive fireworks display and the final panel depicts a woman simply gazing in wonder at the night sky out of her window. There are plenty of crowds and loads of people, but there are plenty of quieter moments with a single individual. But even in those quieter moments, you can see pain and loss.
I can't recall seeing another comic that takes a completely non-narrative approach like this. You could argue that this isn't even a comic. (Scott McCloud's definition, you'll recall, requires the images to be in a "deliberate sequence" and while I'm sure Masereel did choose which images he wanted in which order, I don't think changing that order would have any impact to the overall "story.") There are certainly sequences in other comics that take a similar approach, but none that I can recall where they do that exclusively; they're framed within a more 'traditional' sequential narrative. Regardless of your how strict your definition of "comics" is, Masereel The City (which has been published numerous times -- since the book is wordless and black + white, you can pick up any copy, even foreign language editions, and get the same experience) is definitely worth checking out.
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