Jason Lutes Conversation and Book Signing

Join comics creator Jason Lutes in conversation with scholar Dr. Evan H. Carver as they discuss Lutes’s expansive work, Berlin – the source text for Court Theatre’s world premiere production.

Jason Lutes’s Berlin is an intricate look at the fall of the Weimar Republic through the eyes of its citizens – Marthe Müller, a young woman escaping the memory of a brother killed in World War I; Kurt Severing, an idealistic journalist losing faith in the printed word as fascism and extremism take hold; the Brauns, a family torn apart by poverty and politics. Lutes weaves these characters’ lives into the larger fabric of a city slowly ripping apart.

The city itself is the central protagonist in this historical fiction. Lavish salons, crumbling sidewalks, dusty attics, and train stations: all these places come alive in Lutes’s masterful hand. Weimar Berlin was the world’s metropolis, where intellectualism, creativity, and sensuous liberal values thrived, and Lutes maps its tragic, inevitable decline. Devastatingly relevant and beautifully told, Berlin is one of the great epics of the comics medium.

April 25, 2025 | Seminary Co-Op Bookstore (5751 S Woodlawn Ave, Chicago, IL 60637) | 12:00pm – 1:00pm

Image from “The Concord Hour,” directed by Damon Locks and Rob Shaw.

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