The Complete Persepolis: Blog Post #1

My Thoughts and Impressions of the Complete Persepolis

So far, I thought Persepolis was very interesting as I have not been exposed much to Iranian culture or the topic of their revolutionary war. The formatting of a comic book made the story come alive and allowed me as a reader to imagine what really happened during this time period as it may be hard to understand without a visual representation due to a lack of cultural experience. With limited words and simplistic images, Satrapi tells the story in a way that allows the audience to imagine the situation in her exact interpretation of it. She relies more on illustrations in order to tell her story rather than paragraphs of text. By only using white and black color in the comic images, Satrapi conveys the actions during this time period with the black signifying darkness or violence and the white symbolizing goodness. The larger the event, for example, when the Shah leaves Iran, large comic strips were used in order to emphasize the significance, while smaller events have much smaller comic strips. The words and images work together as a few words may only be above the comic strip and the images really tie together Satrapi's thoughts.