With the release of every graphic biography come the inevitable comparisons to Art Spiegelman’s seminal Maus, a sequential-art rendition of his parents’ survival of Jewish persecution by the Nazis during World War II. Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood is one of the few graphic memoirs worthy of this comparison.
In simple, innocent lines and black and white contrast, Satrapi retells the story of her life in Iran during the Islamic Revolution. The purity of her drawings maximizes the impact of her message by softening the full horror of her story. The execution of family, the bombing of neighbors, the hypocrisy of recent converts to Islam, the harassment suffered for the most innocuous Western practices, the continued frustration and chaos of Iran’s political state overtaken by Fundamentalism eventually push Satrapi’s parents to ship her off to Vienna at age 14. Satrapi conveys the fear and frustration of her coming-of-age, contrasting the enlightenment of her parents' political views with the compromising they must do in order to survive.
It takes a delicate hand to tell such a loaded story. Satrapi’s Perespolis manages to educate and illuminate without lapsing into rhetoric or sentimentality.