I must apologize, I have failed as a searcher. I was going to try to track down a listing for “Dialectic Materialism,” the comic book version that Satrapi said she read in “Perseplois.” It turns out I was not the only one that has tried to find this title as I stumbled across a forum post here.

This lead to two things, one was an interview with the author of “Persepolis,” and this part caught my eye.

“Dave: You didn’t grow up with comic books, though, right? You mention the one your parents gave you on dialectic materialism.

Satrapi: That was the only comic book that I read. My cousins were reading Tintin and these kinds of things, but in Tintin you don’t have any female persons, so I couldn’t identify with any of it.

I have read some comics, a little bit, but I don’t come from a culture of comics. When I see my other colleagues, all of them from the age of five wanted to become cartoonists. I had so many professions before. I didn’t want to do this particularly. It just happened.

All my life it has been like that. I’m a very hard working person if I have to be, but I won’t kill myself to achieve a goal. If it doesn’t happen, it doesn’t happen.”

(The whole interview can be found here.)

I found it very interesting that someone that had not grown up with comic books still ended up making one.  The other thing I found was a theory that the book that she read was “Marx for Beginners.” I was fortunate enough to find a copy that I could flip though, but I do not believe this is the book Satrapi read, mainly because the book itself is less a comic book and more of a heavily illustrated novel. And I also could not find what Satrapi described in Persepolis on pages 12 and 13.