Berlin taught Lutes what fascism looks like-and although he knew he’d find it in old books and black-and-white photographs, he didn’t expect to see anything like it in his own country.īerlin owes its existence to an advertisement in The Nation. What began as an esoteric obsession, a fictional journey into the annals of history, suddenly seems timely. This year, almost a quarter-century after Lutes started the series, he will send the final chapter to his publisher. “I had never imagined that the city that I’d studied for so long would actually strike me as beautiful.” “Here it was, in the light of the sunset,” Lutes says. But until that day, he had never seen Berlin up close. He’d assembled thousands of reference images: rooftops and railroad tracks, soldiers and shopkeepers, spectacles and streetcars. Lutes was drawing a series of comic books called Berlin, about daily life during the rise of fascism. “In all the photographs I’d ever looked at, it was in black and white.” “My first thought was, oh my god, it’s in color,” he says. Instead, through the windows of a speeding train, he saw green trees, brown spires, and blue skies. The first time Jason Lutes visited Berlin, in 2000, he expected to see crowded tenements and gray cobblestone streets.
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