“This capacious and sobering intimacy into the lives of the poor and political … reveals how very little control most have against the halting and often misfunctioning machines of power about them.”

A rare gift from the genre which so often sets its bar for story low. Lutes’s Berlin is history, story, maelstrom, and forecast.

Told almost exclusively from the ground-level of ordinary Germans in the late Weimar Republic, this capacious and sobering intimacy into the lives of the poor and political, astute and insensate, opportunist and idealist, reveals how very little control most have against the halting and often misfunctioning machines of power about them.

Our main characters meet, love, argue, shrug, manipulate, fight, and die with too-familiar ignorance and impotence. While we readers witness the portents Lutes drops through the multi-year storyline (and ourselves learn much from the extensive historical research here), few others understand exactly what is looming, and by the time they might, see already how it is far too late.

Along the way, however, we spend most of our time in their struggles: arguments on art theory, journalistic mission, fragmenting political movements, polarizing rhetoric, queer nightlife, debutante morality, American jazz and race fetishes, Jewish humility and charity, love-stung misadventure, rural apathy, and the like. It’s difficult to capture just how broad is Lutes’s brush, how detailed his illustrative frames, all compelling reading.

By any measure, Berlin belongs with works by Alison Bechdel, Craig Thompson, Will Eisner, and Marjane Satrapi as fulfilling the potential of the graphic novel.