The Complete Persepolis

#165
Title: The Complete Persepolis
Author: Marjane Satrapi
Publisher: Pantheon Books
Year: 2007
341 pages

An omnibus including Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood and Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return.

This is fascinating reading in a week where Iran is conducting missile tests. Like Bechdel's Fun Home, this memoir-in-cartoons begins in the narrator's girlhood and takes the reader through her young womanhood. Satrapi describes the Iranian revolution through a child's eyes--that is, personal concerns often supersede political knowledge. As the threat of fundamentalism grows, Satrapi's parents send her to Europe; after what sounds like a miserable adolescence, she returns to Iran. Where Bechdel's drawings are black lines on a white ground, Satrapi often works with white lines on a primarily black background. This contributes an atmospheric weight to her story, especially when all the men are dressed in black and the women are veiled. Some reviewers are unhappy with the middle European section, where Satrapi is a depressed, pot-smoking pseudo-anarchist. I thought it served as an excellent surreal foil for the equally surreal Iranian portions of the narrative that frame it.

If I could find a memoir in graphic novel form by a person with a disability or mental health diagnosis, similar to Persepolis and Fun Home, I'd teach a class using these three books. Let me know if you know of one!