WHEN MARJANE SATRAPI BEGAN DRAWING again, depicting the violence recently enacted by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, she was so disturbed that she felt physical pain. “I get finger cramps when I have to draw them,” she shudders.
It is 24 years since Satrapi’s bestselling comic-book masterpiece, Persepolis, transformed western readers’ image of Iran. Her graphic memoir was told through the eyes of a cheeky, outspoken young girl growing up during and after the 1979 Islamic revolution, buying Kim Wilde cassettes on the black market, and trying to make sense of arrests, torture, the “morality police” and the carnage of the Iran-Iraq war, before being brutally uprooted to Europe, alone, aged 14, because her parents felt she would be safer there.
Millions of copies of Persepolis have been sold, making Satrapi one of the biggest-selling Iranian authors of all time and the first woman to be nominated for an animated feature Oscar for the hit film adaptation. Her cartoons were in demand from newspapers around the world, but she stopped drawing them in 2004, moving to other forms of storytelling and subject matter. She made five feature films, including the acclaimed 2020 Radioactive, about Marie Curie’s pioneering scientific research. But for years after Persepolis, the international press hankered after the expressive face of her nine-year-old cartoon alter ego.
