English-language books on Berlin are oddly rare, for reasons I don’t entirely understand. Trying to hunt one down on Amazon, I ran into Jason Lutes’ Berlin ^[1], a portrait of ’20s Berlin as a graphic novel. I’m pretty enthusiastic about comics; 90% are crap ^[2], but the few great ^[3] successes ^[4] make up for them. And, if this review ^[5] is anything to go by, Berlin is one of the good ones:

tracing the arcs of several overlapping narratives; playing with time; a fiction based around real events; in particular, mapping the sense of bewilderment, loss, chaos, creativity, and uncertainty in Berlin at that point – a city on the edge. Lutes plays out the chance encounters in bustling city life with real grace, ultimately to heartbreaking effect.

Has anybody read the thing? Is it as good as all that?