I’d also seen parts of the film version of Cabaret, but I really had no understanding of Weimar, the politics, or what Berlin really was. How much did you actually know about Berlin or the Weimar era back then?īerlin only existed in my head at that point, thanks to Wings of Desire which I had seen when I was in my twenties. Also, from the very beginning, I had made a decision about how long it was going to be: 600 pages. I decided it was going to be about Weimar Berlin. When I saw the ad for the Bertolt Brecht’s Berlin book, I remember thinking, that’s it! That’s the next thing I’m gonna do. Yes that’s pretty much it! I was just finishing my previous book Jar of Fools and I felt I had come to an understanding about how comics work, and I was thinking about what to do next. After filtering through that data, I see my job as using my imagination to make that stuff come alive.Īnyhow, check out the interview (there are some pages of the work there so you can see what it looks like), and check out the series, too! It's peachy keen! The second book is just coming out now, it's called Berlin: City of Smoke (the first book was called Berlin: City of Stones).Is it true that before embarking on this journey, you were a 28-year-old art director for Seattle’s indie weekly The Stranger, and that it was an advertisement for a book of photographs called Bertolt Brecht’s Berlin that inspired your decision to start this graphic novel? Was it really that impulsive? That being said, there's a point I have to allow my imagination to take over.

My publisher sent someone out to take photos, and then I redrew the train station from the photos for the German edition. And luckily so far it's been place names wrong, and once I did a train station that was totally wrong. But the book's coming out in Germany, and my German publisher has been really good about checking that stuff. With historical events, my notebooks always have a timeline, so if an event affects the story I can reflect that. As someone who doesn't read German or speak German, it's a challenge. How much effort do you put into getting all the historical references accurate?Ī German historian might take issue. It is such a great (and relatively rare, ongoing series-wise) comic book historical fiction, that I found Lutes' comments on his historical accuracy particularly interesting: I can't believe it has been a decade since the first issue was released!! Oooh, nifty! I just noticed this nice little interview that Van Jensen did with Jason Lutes here about Lutes' awesome Berlin series, which Lutes is currently preparing for the final book (each book consists of eight individual issues, so we still have eight issues of Berlin to look forward to!).

Berlin by jason lutes