by Julia H. Jackson
“I see no intrinsic reason why a doubly talented artist might not arise and create a comic strip novel masterpiece.” – John Updike, 1969
A young Iranian girl is sent to boarding school in Switzerland in an effort to escape the Iranian revolution. One night, after her boyfriend breaks up with her and she is left alone in an isolated European metropolis, she gets on the subway and rides it in loops all night long. She is an outspoken artist, a teenager living in exile whose strongest bonds are to the God she is just beginning to doubt and her uncle Anoosh, who is a political prisoner.
Who is this girl? And how do we know her?
We see her in thick black and white lines, her story outlined in rectangular blocks, words penciled in panels like a photograph’s negative. She is Marjane Satrapi, cartoonist, writer, and author of Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood, and its sequel, Persepolis 2: The Story of Return. Satrapi, who grew up in Iran during the Islamic Revolution and was educated in Iran, Switzerland, and France, transformed her story into an animated film in 2007. Satrapi’s story is family, exile, religion, art, politics, and personal growth, and it transcends both cartoons and memoir. Her work is best categorized as graphic novel, a genre that we will explore in today’s Write Like You Mean It: Graphic Storytelling.
