Background
Lutes was born in New Jersey, but his family soon relocated to Missoula, Montana.
Lutes was born in New Jersey, but his family soon relocated to Missoula, Montana.
Lutes went to college at the Rhode Island School of Design, graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1991.
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 Editor Brubaker), and many short pieces for anthologies and compilations. 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.
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.
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 Productions closed in 1998, Drawn & Quarterly took over the series.
Lutes subsequently moved to Asheville, North Carolina, in October 2002.
This move forms the subject of his autobiographical Rules to Live By, collected in AutobioGraphix by Dark Horse Comics. In 2007, Hyperion published the graphic novel Houdini: The Handcuff King, written by Lutes and illustrated by Nick Bertozzi. Starting in the spring of 2008, he became part of the faculty of the Center for Cartoon Studies.
He is now an adjunct professor there.