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By Marjane Satrapi (Jonathan Cape 2003)
ISBN: 0-224-06440-1
The image of a child, the stylings of a child, the remembrances of a child have a captivating power to enthrall adults. Marjane Satrapi grew up during the Fundamentalist revolution that toppled the Shah of Iran and replaced him with an Islamic theocracy. She chose to relate incidents from her life with the stark direct drawings and sharp, unleavened voice of a child. Her simple, direct reportage owes as much to Anne Frank as Art Spiegleman when she relates the incidents that shaped her life and her identity as a thinking female in a society that increasing seemed to frown on that sort of thing.
Persepolis is the kind of graphic novel that casual and intellectual readers love, focusing on the content of the message and decrying or at best ignoring the technical skill and craft of the medium that conveys it. Yet graphic narrative is as much an art form of craft and thought as it is the dustbin of sophomoric genre stereotypes that many critics relegate it to. Satrapi has created a work that is powerful and engaging, but in a sorry twist of reality, it is one that comics fans, and not the general public have to be convinced to read.
© Marjane Satrapi 2003.