Wes Phillips

My wife gave me a copy of The Complete Persepolis for my birthday and I've been devouring it greedily. Satrapi's graphic novel uses a charmingly primitive visual style to tell a horrifying story of growing up in revolutionary Iran.

So, if I've been greedily devouring it, why haven't I completed it yet? Because it so powerfully portrays events—such as sending the ill-trained children's army to be slaughtered in WWI-style human wave assaults by promising them paradise—that I frequently have to put it aside and just think for a while.

I'm used to that response with print (cf Chet Raymo's Walking Zero), but I think Persepolis is the first graphic novel to inspire it. And yes, that includes Maus, which impressed me, moved me, and irritated me in equal measures.

Now Persepolis is a hand-drawn (yay!) animated film—attacked by the Iranian government, embraced by the French (it's their Oscar candidate), and the object of some bemusement by the author. "For the first six months, I felt like killing everybody at the studio every day. In front of them I was, like, 'Hello, how are you doing?' and as soon as they were gone it was, 'Die, die, die!'?"