His 'big break' came in 1993, when he began drawing a weekly comics page called 'Jar of Fools' for The Stranger, Seattle's alternative paper.

Upon graduation in 1991, he moved to Seattle, where he spent several years working as a dishwasher and assistant art director at Fantagraphics Books. While at RISD, among the many new comics he encountered were Art Spiegelman's RAW magazine and Chester Brown's Yummy Fur, which together inspired him to start publishing minicomics under the imprint 'Penny Dreadful.' Lutes graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design with a BFA in Illustration in 1991. Jason Lutes was born in New Jersey in 1967 and grew up reading American superhero and western comics until a trip to France at age nine introduced him to the world of 'bandes dessinées.' In the late 1970s he discovered Heavy Metal magazine and the tabletop role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons, both of which proved major influences on his creative development. Devastatingly relevant and beautifully told, Berlin is one of the great epics of the comics medium. Weimar Berlin was the world’s metropolis, where intellectualism, creativity, and sensuous liberal values thrived, and Lutes maps its tragic, inevitable decline. Lavish salons, crumbling sidewalks, dusty attics, and train stations: all these places come alive in Lutes’ masterful hand. The city itself is the central protagonist in this historical fiction.

Lutes weaves these characters’ lives into the larger fabric of a city slowly ripping apart.

Berlin is one of the high-water marks of the medium: rich in its well-researched historical detail, compassionate in its character studies, and as timely as ever in its depiction of a society slowly awakening to the stranglehold of fascism.īerlin is an intricate look at the fall of the Weimar Republic through the eyes of its citizens-Marthe Müller, a young woman escaping the memory of a brother killed in World War I, Kurt Severing, an idealistic journalist losing faith in the printed word as fascism and extremism take hold the Brauns, a family torn apart by poverty and politics. Twenty years in the making, this sweeping masterpiece charts Berlin through the rise of Nazismĭuring the past two decades, Jason Lutes has quietly created one of the masterworks of the graphic novel golden age. 'Astonishing in its scope, breadth and execution.'- The Independent

'If there was ever any doubt of a graphic novel’s ability to achieve a high level of storytelling, this book blows it away.'- Newsday

Berlin jason lutes hardcover