PERSEPOLIS ...perpetually perplexed by a Persian protagonist
from Quarantined Comics Hosted by Quarantined Comics
During a worldwide Quarantined Comics and Rabbit Fighters podcast REVOLUTION, Raman + Josh (two non-Persian dudes doing a Persian protagonist podcat) got the ORIGINAL band back together to talk about a comic that somehow NEITHER of us had read before, PERSEPOLIS, by Marjane Satrapi, an award winning, now banned graphic autobiography from the early 2000s about a young girl growing up in Iran, and becoming a woman overseas, returning home, and dealing with everything in between. The book was originally published in French, and has sold millions of copies worldwide. Its creator Satrapi later produced an award-winning film of the same name In Persepolis, we meet young Marjane “Marji” Satrapi growing up in Tehran just before and during the Iranian Revolution of 1979, as well as thru the start of the Iran + Iraq War in the 1980s. Her parents, are secular, upper-middle class activists, who worry for their precocious daughter's safety in the increasingly conservative and dangerous Iran, so send her off to Austria to become a teenager. Her teen years are fraught with all the drama you can expect from such an experience, but Marji - now becoming a young woman - always maintains the experience of an outsider looking in - with her feet in both worlds. Marji eventually returns to Iran to find that not only has her mother country changed, but she as well. This book was a surprise and illuminating for us in many ways, making us question - what would WE do in such a situation?
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