Jason Lutes (placeholder)

Jason Lutes was born in New Jersey in 1967 and like many children loved superhero comics. Taken to France as a child, the “bandes dessinées” he discovered there made a great impression on him.

He graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design with a BFA in Illustration in 1991. While studying, Lutes had come across R. Crumb’s Weirdo, Art Spiegelman’s RAW, and Chester Brown’s Yummy Fur. Excited by what he found, Lutes began his own first mini-comic press, Penny Dreadful. He moved to Seattle in 1991 where, after a series of unfortunate events, he worked for Fantagraphics, lost his spleen, and explored employment with a rich variety of eateries as a dishwasher.

Lutes’ big break came in 1993 when he began drawing a strip for Seattle’s alternative weekly, The Stranger. By 1995 he had become the newspaper’s art director, but after his strip was collected in the critically acclaimed graphic novel Jar of Fools in 1996, he decided to devote himself to comics full time.

After two years of research, Lutes embarked on the ambitious comic book series Berlin, an ongoing 24-chapter story set in the twilight years of the Weimar Republic. When its original publisher Black Eye closed in 1998, Drawn & Quarterly promptly took over the series. Lutes claims, “I realized a longstanding dream by joining the Drawn & Quarterly stable, but was disappointed when the top hat and cigar comprising my signing bonus were both too large to be of any practical use.” The first 8 issues are collected in D&Q’s Berlin: City of Stones, published in 2001. The story reached its mid-point in December 2005 with Berlin #12.
—from his bio on the Drawn & Quarterly Website