Jason Lutes

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Jason Lutes

Born	July 12, 1967 (1967-07-12) (age 40) New Jersey, United States
Occupation	comic book writer
Nationality	American
Genres	comic book, fiction, non-fiction

Influences Art Spiegelman, The Adventures of Tintin, Asterix

Jason Lutes (born July 12, 1967),^[1] is an American comics creator. His work is mainly historical fiction, but he also works in traditional fiction. His work includes the Berlin series and Jar of Fools, as well as The Fall (with Ed Brubaker), and many short pieces for anthologies and compilations.

Lutes was born in New Jersey, but his family soon relocated to Missoula, Montana. In his early years, Lutes liked superhero comics, but a trip to France exposed him to European comics like The Adventures of Tintin and Asterix, which he says greatly affected his style of drawing.^[2]

Lutes went to college at the Rhode Island School of Design, graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1991. He moved to Seattle after graduation, where he found work for the alternative comics publisher Fantagraphics, and eventually became art director of the alternative weekly The Stranger.^[3]

During this period, Lutes began writing and self-publishing his own comic work with Penny Dreadful Press. In 1993 Lutes began serializing a strip for The Stranger, which was collected in 1996 in the critically acclaimed graphic novel Jar of Fools. 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 Germany's Weimar Republic. When Berlin's original publisher Black Eye closed in 1998, Drawn & Quarterly took over the series.

In 2007, Hyperion published the graphic novel Houdini: The Handcuff King, written by Lutes and illustrated by Nick Bertozzi.

Lutes also contributed unit portraits for the open-source TBS Battle for Wesnoth, and to keep the style consistent, most later portraits made by other people have tried to stay in similar style.