![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() The compositional principle of Berlin is montage. It includes a bibliography and a helpful key to the many persons, both real and fictional, populating the book. Although he published parts of Berlin serially along the way-first in small pamphlet-sized comics, then in three paperback volumes subtitled “City of Stones,” “City of Smoke,” and “City of Light”-the complete Berlin, nearly six hundred pages, can at last be read in one volume, a beautiful, fully baked brick. Twenty-one years later, at age fifty, Lutes was done. At age twenty-eight, he figured the project might take him fourteen years to complete. Before Lutes began his research-two years’ worth, as it turned out-most of what he knew of his subject, as he told me in an interview at a comics expo this past fall, came from the movie Cabaret. The idea occurred to him when he happened to see an advertisement for a book of photographs called Bertolt Brecht’s Berlin. In 1997 Jason Lutes, a comics editor and cartoonist in Seattle known for Jar of Fools, a graphic novel about an alcoholic magician and his senile mentor, set out to create an ambitious comic about Berlin in the late Weimar period, just before Hitler’s rise to power. A page from the graphic novel Berlin by Jason Lutes ![]()
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