Persepolis

    (Pantheon, 2003-2004, 2007)
™ and © Pantheon

In October 2003, Shirin Ebadi, an Iranian female lawyer, won the Nobel Peace Prize for her activism for human rights. Against this backdrop, Marjane Satrapi’s comics autobiography about her childhood growing up in the capital of Tehran during the 1979 Islamic Revolution seems even more relevant.

Born in 1969, Satrapi is the great-granddaughter of Iran’s last emperor and was born into a family of educated and politically conscious leftists. Together, they witnessed their country’s regime change from the military imperialist shah to the religious fundamentalist Ayatollah Khomeini. In simple monochrome panels, Satrapi depicts with Orwellian irony and wry sarcasm the battle of survival that an individual must wage to survive within a totalitarian state, where indulging in the simple pleasures in life (such as alcohol and Western consumerism) suddenly became grounds for execution.

Forced by her parents to flee to France when she turned 14, Satrapi prepared her successful graphic novel in Europe, which paved the way for a U.S. edition in English. In a child’s picture-book format, sophisticated ideas are presented as timeless memory.

— Oliver Chin
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