Respondent

Reading Leon’s post, I found I had a similar reaction to the almost child-like drawings the first time I read Persepolis, when I was much less familiar with graphic novels. In fact, as I was rereading this over lunch, my friend had a reaction that I’m sure Satrapi comes across all the time: with such straightforward art and so much text, why isn’t this just a regular novel? (Of course, you can always argue back, what’s not normal about drawing? Why does word-only have to be the norm? But I think I understand what he means.)

Well, it seems to me that as the narrator matures, the art does tend to “grow up” with her. If you check out the last two panels on page 3 (the first page),  it looks very much like what a kid might draw when asked to describe her school: there are a lot of little pictures within the big one; faces are just eyes, mouth and a triangle nose; and sizing of different things has more to do with their detail and importance than any sense of perspective. What this suggested to me at first was, in fact, that the story could be framed as a sort of school assignment–tell us your life–and that an imaginative girl like the narrator might choose to do this in pictures. Turning to any given page later on in the novel (and trying not to spoil anything), you can see a bit more realism in most panels, and I would argue that the fantasy scenes get even more expressionistic and wild.

There are many reasons that Satrapi may have decided to draw her autobiography, including the disparities and hints at Persian art we’ve discussed in class. To this I’d add the ability of visual art to instantly display the narrator’s different mental states at different points in her life.