Persepolis

When western people talk about Iran, they are usually thinking about Islamic fundamentalism, disastrous war between Iran and Iraq, nuclear weapons tests… However, they don’t know what it is like to grow up and live in Iran. Graphic novelist, Marjane Satrapi, in her autobiographical comic book Persepolis that was published in French, recounts her childhood life in Iran during and after the Islamic revolution. Satrapi’s purpose is to show French people what it is like to live in Iran at that particular time in a comic form. She described her experience through little Marjane(Marji)’s eyes in order to develop empathy with her audiences.
Satrapi successfully presents Iranian people’s life at that time though comic form. Comics are art forms that
combined by images and texts and it attract mainly young people by their fantastic stories contain author's’ worldview and their outlooks in life.
Nevertheless, in some countries like Japan and Korean, people in different generations read comics for entertainment. Compared to other medium, comics are more creative and intuitive. Comics can easily show authors’ incredible imagination that cannot come true in daily life. Comic authors can use their fantastic drawing and text to presents their imaginations; however, movie producers need to put more efforts on making their fantasies seem realistic according to the immature technology. For example, superhero comics are adapted into movies recently even though these comics were published a long time ago. To perform superheroes’ superpowers, movie producers need to develop the techniques of special effects, but in comics, the authors only need to draw it on paper. In Persepolis, drawing helps Satrapi to present little Marji’s imagination, such as how Marji imagines herself talks to God. What’s more, comic authors can use the different arrangement of the images and texts to express their ideas to the audiences. The arrangement of the images helps audiences understand the relationships between different images. In Persepolis, the arrangement of the images helps the readers understand the process of Iran revolutions and the change of Marji’s emotions. For example,
Satrapi uses three paralleled images to show three rules that Marji is going to set when she becomes a prophet. The paralleled structure indicates that these three rules all are important in her mind without priority orders. However, if a book writer writes the same thing in his/her book, he must be put these three rules in a certain order even though he/she doesn’t do it on purpose. The readers of comics usually have good imaginations to relate all the images together. Comic books’ target audiences are mostly young adults and teens. Images can catch their attention quickly, and the length of each chapter doesn’t make them lose patience.
Satrapi is intended to restore common people’s daily lives during the Islamic revolution and the Iran-Iraq war by inviting the audiences to feel the empathy with her life.
She chose to use first person point of view to tell the story through “little Marji”s eyes. People will easily connect themselves with Marji because everyone had childish thoughts like Marji has. For example, in the first chapter, Marji was asked to put the veil on for the first time, but she doesn’t understand why she needs to put it on. For most audiences, they can understand Marji’s feeling because they don’t understand the meaning of putting the veils on either. Also, Marji’s daily life with her family can remind the audiences the memory they have with their families. Satrapi’s drawing is simple in the book. The characters have very little facial details. Audiences easily imagine themselves as the characters. She uses a patho appeal to make the audiences perceive same feelings with her, so the audience can understand how desperate the situation that Iranian people were at that particular time. In addition, Satrapi uses black and white drawing to contrast with Marji’s turbulent experience. Different with most Comics, Persepolis isn’t a comic for children. It has been challenged in the U.S multiple time for "gambling, offensive language, political viewpoint" (Blakemore, n.p.) Some comics are just for entertainment, but Satrapi not only tells stories of her life, but also expresses her political viewpoint
and her personal ideology in Persepolis, so somehow people call Persepolis as a graphic novel. And Satrapi successfully approaches her purpose of writing this book, which is to show a real Iran. She believes “that an entire nation should not be judged by the wrongdoings of a few extremists. [She] also [doesn't] want those Iranians who lost their lives in prisons defending freedom, who died in the war against Iraq, who suffered under various repressive regimes, or who were forced to leave their families and flee their homeland to be forgotten.”(Satrapi, Marjane, n.p.)
In conclusion, Persepolis is a successful and interesting comic book that Marjane Satrapi successfully presents a vivid Iran to people all around the world by using comics to describe her childhood daily life.