The Dime-Store Education

Comics for Smart People

I left Persepolis as a tip for a cute hairstylist once.  I’m not sure if it was the comic, my hilarious jokes, or the way my hair sounded between scissors, but we dated for about three months.  I’m not suggesting you can use comics as a tool to pick up women.  I’m telling you.  It’s a fact.

Every once in a while a comic comes along, grabs you by the belt and shakes you out of any preconceived notions you have about sequential art.  This is a nice in for the skeptics.

Marjane Satrapi grew up in Iran during the 80’s in the middle of a war with Iraq.  Her story is beautifully human, illustrating the complexities of being a young girl - starting to date, growing in imbalanced ways, alternating role models between revolutionists and god - while trying to survive in a country where the buildings disintegrate in the blink of a dictator’s eye.  And yet, the story is still funny, because even when the world is crashing down, so long as you’re not caught in the blast, life still goes on.  Eventually, Satrapi moved to France (this won’t be the last time you hear me say this, but some of the best comics these days come from France) to escape her volatile life.  She broke the chains of modesty expected of Iranian women in order to write this comic.

This brings us to the interesting space where cartoonish figures cross are thrown into real-life tragedies.  It’s strange to see, especially if you aren’t used to it.  Satrapi’s drawings are plain B&W, round exploring eyes and swooping noses.  These simple faces that seem best suited for Saturday mornings with cereal and pajamas are quickly deranged by war.  If you take a closer look, after the heartache, you’ll notice all the expressions of a real human face cut down to the basics: the swooping lines are the wrinkles eyes exhausted, breasts sagging, the hands desperate.

I tell people this is a book about sexuality in Iran to pique interest, even though that’s only a small part of what Satrapi discusses.  It’s interesting to look at a country that blurs images of musical instruments like we might blur a nipple, because they’re considered to be too sexual.

After you’ve read the comic, check out the movie of the same name.  It’s one of the rare delights where the author/artist had complete creative control over the content.  The characters move with a beautiful elasticity and calls back to the old thirties cartoons while maintaining a new cinematic sheen.

Recommended to: history buffs, political types, and hair-stylists named Vanessa

-CMH

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 19th, 2009 at 12:00 am and is filed under All Comics, Rez Sick. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.