Jason Lutes' 'Berlin': a zeppelin-sized epic

There's a Berlin you don't know. Before Christo mummified bits of it, before it became a source of fun tapes on That's Incredible of families trying to jump the Wall before they were shot, before Harry Truman airlifted it tons of canned ravioli, there was another Berlin, a crowded metropolis where intellectuals bumped shoulders with artists and various factions of loud, yelling people got their heads thumped by police regularly.

COURTESY DRAWN & QUARTERLY Jason Lutes will visit the Yale Bookstore on Tues., Apr. 10, at 4:30 p.m.

This is the Weimar-era city of Jason Lutes' cartoon epic Berlin, and reading it, one gets the feeling that he plans to introduce the reader to every single person in the city before he's done. In the space of 10 pages in Chapter Two, for instance, we encounter an impoverished, hallucinating art student; a mother on the train to a factory job; a pack of bullies chasing a Jewish paperboy; the paperboy's family; two other art students and their trip to a cabaret; and one of the cabaret dancers, who also moonlights as a model and is the object of the first art student's obsession. It's a crowded town.

Lutes, however, is a more than able guide. His first book, Jar of Fools, showed his remarkable ability to juggle multiple viewpoints, and in Berlin he increases his load tenfold. Lutes' storytelling adopts a kind of roaming omniscience, as willing to spend time in the head of a stoplight operator as in that of a Jewish baker This makes for some impressive sequences, such as the daisy chain of encounters above, which introduces us to several important faces. Lutes' technique also shines in panoramas where people's random thoughts—about the price of a shave or the shape of a woman's breasts—fill up the panel in a chorus of dazzling banality: "where are my keys" raised to opera.

Lutes carries other habits over to Berlin from Jar of Fools, among them a melancholic fixation on place and memory, and more dangerously, a penchant for melodrama. The former makes for some good scenes, like a story about the death of activist Rosa Luxembourg that resonates throughout the book. The latter is more problematic, as it conflicts with Lutes' avowed goal of creating Berlin "more as a portrait of time and the people in that time than a plot-driven narrative."

Example: Lutes first introduces us to his Berlin through the eyes of new arrival Marthe Mueller, who has come to the city to study art. She meets journalist Kurt Severing on the train. After he briefly introduces her to the city, they head off in separate directions, yet meet again several chapters later and wind up sleeping together on a lonely Christmas Eve. They fall in love, which leaves Marthe's lesbian friend Anna, who's developed a crush on her, heartbroken and spiraling into attention-getting depravity, and...

And here we see the risk of throwing so many characters together in so many interconnected stories. While Lutes often achieves some wonderful effects through his wildly roaming viewpoints, he sometimes succumbs to the temptation of applying an iron hand to these storylines, making their payoffs feel a little too clever. This is especially clear with the story of factory worker Gudrun Braun, whose marriage and family splits a little too neatly along gender and political lines (the female communists go with Mom, and the boy goes with the fascist father). The dialogue during these passages often feels like a clunky attempt at old-fashionedness ("I should leave you to your mirth"), which doesn't help.

This, however, doesn't diminish the undeniable pleasure of reading Berlin. Lutes' love of Tintin shows in his scrupulous, cleanly drawn recreations of the city, and he's a master at arranging densely packed panels—his riot scenes feature masterfully jumbled fragments that evoke chaos while controlling it, allowing the reader to assemble the scene into a coherent picture. In addition, Lutes breaks his generally solemn mood more often, allowing Berlin to venture into social absurdity—like the crowd of people fleeing gunfire who nevertheless heed a "keep off the grass" sign—or ludicrous non-sequiturs—like the intrusion of a WWI veteran's naked mother into his dream about the war.

City of Stones composes the first third of a projected 600-page story, and while it feels somewhat incomplete, Lutes' energy, ambition, and skill make for a satisfying chunk of a book. Berlin closes with the May Day riots of 1929, after which the fragile republic really started going down the crapper, so a compelling second act should be on the way.

Lutes will be signing copies of Berlin at the Yale Bookstore on Tues., Apr. 10 at 4:30 p.m., so if you drop by then, you can offer him valuable suggestions, like "more funny stuff." Cartoonists love that.

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