Part of Series
The second installment of the epic historical trilogy The second volume of Jason Lutes’s historical epic finds the people of Weimar Berlin searching for answers after the lethal May Day demonstration of 1929. Tension builds along with the dividing wall between communists and nationalists, Jews and Gentiles, as the dawn of the Second World War draws closer. Meanwhile, the nightlife of Berlin heats up as many attempt to distract themselves from the political upheavals within the city. The American jazz band Cocoa Kids arrives and quickly becomes a fixture. The lives of the characters within Lutes’s epic weave together to create a seamless portrait of this transitory city. Marthe Muller follows her lover Kurt Severing as he interviews participants in the May Day demonstration, but she moonlights in the city’s lesbian nightlife.Severing acts as a window through which the political shifts within the city and its participants can be seen. As with Berlin Book One: City
Author
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. Lutes graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design with a BFA in Illustration in 1991. 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." Upon graduation in 1991, he moved to Seattle, where he spent several years working as a dishwasher and assistant art director at Fantagraphics Books. 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. By 1995 he had become the paper's art director, but upon collecting and self-publishing Jar of Fools in 1996, he left The Stranger and made the leap to becoming a full-time cartoonist. In the handful of productive years following that decision, Lutes began the comic book series Berlin, an ongoing 22-chapter story set in the twilight years of the Weimar Republic. The first eight chapters are collected in Berlin: City of Stones, and chapters nine through sixteen are collected in Berlin: City of Smoke. Lutes currently lives in Vermont with his partner and two children, where he teaches comics at the Center for Cartoon Studies and works on City of Light, the final installment of his Berlin trilogy, whenever he can find the time. He still tries to play Dungeons & Dragons once a week with friends.
