RaveThe Brooklyn Rail... a crowning narratival and artistic achievement by one of American comics’ greatest innovators ... a masterpiece ... a deeply engrossing tale ... The plot is intricate and hops around in time ... It is steeped in conventional genre motifs and techniques ... Somehow Windsor-Smith manages to weave all these familiar strands together into an immensely satisfying and exciting and deeply emotional whole. The keys are the storytelling and the art. The style is realism, but the accomplished and laborious technique is hardly matched in contemporary comics ... This is a book that demands and rewards your attention to every panel.
Jason Lutes
RaveThe Brooklyn RailLutes’s achievement is remarkable as a card-carrying work of historical fiction, and as the product of intense research, both visual and textual ... Lutes deftly interweaves the stories of a large ensemble cast through the entire book in order to trace the economics, culture, and politics of Berlin ... Although Lutes’s epic narrative is like a 19th century novel, it is also cinematic because the point of view shifts from character to character, sweeping people up as they pass ... It also urges the reader to pay close attention to the cartooning and the words. This is a challenging, visually intricate book, comprised of regular small panels featuring densely worked imagery and a concentration on faces and expressions. But Lutes provides some guidance in the form of a helpful portrait gallery of the large cast that reveals who is invented and who was a real person ... Lutes’s Berlin is replete with vivid characters ... Lutes has persuasively recreated the world of late-Weimar Berlin through cartooning. His visually enthralling, emotionally engaging comic is an artistic achievement of the highest order, and one that is expressly urgent.
