Like many cartoonists, Jason Lutes looks strikingly like his own drawings: in his case a face built outward from the eyes, framed by perfectly round glasses, slim and clean-shaven, with a smiler's cheeks. Lutes' new project, Berlin, Book One: City of Stones, is populated by copies of him--living not in Seattle, but in Berlin circa 1929 as imagined by an ambitious Seattle cartoonist.

Readers of Lutes' last book, Jar of Fools (which ran serially in The Stranger several years ago), will immediately recognize Berlin's style of portraiture. Lutes has a certain way of capturing the heft and significance of a brick-and-mortar building and a human body's unconscious relationship with it. The unnamed city in which Jar of Fools unfolded was as much a character as a setting; likewise, Berlin in City of Stones is a texture and a tension that exists between the tenements, government buildings, students, newspaper vendors, bakers, public squares, maimed veterans, tourists, journalists, street corners, and bridges of the city. His art is lush, just not in ways you'd think to look for: It's approachable, inhabitable. It's very difficult to go out into Seattle after an afternoon spent reading a book by Jason Lutes without seeing the buildings on all sides of you drawn by his pen.

City of Stones is the first of three planned volumes that will collect the massive project called Berlin. This first book alone is over 200 pages long. There are no colors, not even gray half-tones or crosshatches. At first riffle, City of Stones might even appear a bit tame--not surprising for a book that attempts to document the events that will culminate in the May Day demonstrations.

When Lutes began this project, he'd never even been to Germany. But he was drawn to the intricate roots of an infamous atrocity and started collecting "photographs, drawings, paintings," he says, "just any kind of visual reference I could find from the time. I made a specific effort not to look at anything post-WWII. I didn't have much of a concept of the city.... I mean, all I knew was Wings of Desire. I remember the Victory Column, and the Brandenburg Gate, and that was pretty much it--just the landmarks.

"When I made the decision to do the story, I knew nothing about that period really. I had the vaguest notion about what was going on then; I knew Bertolt Brecht was there then, and Albert Einstein was around. But like most things I do, I made a very impulsive decision, that I was going to do a 600-page book about this stuff that I knew nothing about," he laughs. "And then proceeded to do kinds of research, and get into it, and really try to build my own mental, basically imaginary city. The photographs and the books I read were the map, basically, and it was my job to really put myself into the territory."

Lutes delves into an odd, but crucial, place and time in world history: the German identity crisis that preceded Hitler's ascension. Berliners are choosing sides in the increasingly frictional clashes between the Communists and the National Socialists, both of which are recruiting with an eye toward bloody conflict. Journalist Kurt Severing is determined to stay above the fray, even as he senses the city's rush toward its own horrible future. Marthe Muller is new to the city and finds herself aswirl in the ridiculous rhetoric of German art students; Gudrun encounters the Communists outside her job at the textile factory and becomes intrigued. Each story is refracted through the thoughts, dreams, and narrative crowd noise of dozens of other characters walking the street of Lutes' Berlin.

Where Art Spiegelman's Maus defined the comics version of World War II, and Joe Sacco's Palestine examined the postwar Jewish state, Berlin acts as a kind of fictional prequel. Like his well-regarded predecessors, Lutes easily avoids the expositional traps that can swallow up historical fiction. "Ideally, I'm trying to make it so that you don't have to have a background in that period at all," he says. "Since it is sort of exploring this imaginary place, but all the characters are also imaginary, the fact that I was taking a city that exists in history and imagining my own version of it as a stage for all the characters to act out their stories just seemed appropriate."

Finally, after the sixth issue was completed, Lutes felt comfortable leaving Seattle to see modern-day Berlin. "It was potentially a dangerous thing for me to do because I had my own Berlin, a private version of the city, and then for that to be confronted by the real thing could possibly annihilate my private version of it. I remember having this feeling on the train to town, like, 'This is a house of cards. It could all come down.' And of course the real city was infinitely more beautiful than I could ever depict it--but it still worked, it still jibed sufficiently."