Marjane Satrapi

It’s amazing to see how much complexity and narrative cunning Satrapi crams into her images... Chicken with Plums is the most intricately laminated of her tales: The author shuffles past, present, and future like a cardsharp.

Beguiling... Completely seamless.

Satrapi pushes the boundaries of her work further still... [She is] an Iranian Colette.

Inspired.

Satrapi’s deceptively simple, remarkably powerful drawings match the precise but flexible prose she employs in adapting to her multiple roles as educator, folklorist, and grand-niece.

A memoir of growing up as a girl in revolutionary Iran, Persepolis provides a unique glimpse into a nearly unknown and unreachable way of life…That Satrapi chose to tell her remarkable story as a gorgeous comic book makes it totally unique and indispensable.

Tantalizing... Bold, bewitchingly humorous and politically astute... A cheeky and knowing peek at the loves, sexual histories and marital secrets of...these beautiful and seductive women.

Endearing... A wicked read.

Humorous and bawdy... An amusing portrayal of independent women taking life in stride.

Embroideries is as funny, opinionated, controversial and surprising as any good comic or conversation should be.

Subversive... Satrapi’s book is a mocking rebuke to the cult of chastity, and a statement about the way human passions find their way around the most determined repression.

By turns bawdy and heartbreaking... Of all Satrapi’s books, Embroideries most effectively tears down the divide between Iranian and American culture, showing how women everywhere are similar.

Wildly charming . . . Like a letter from a friend, in this case a wonderful friend: honest, strong-willed, funny, tender, impulsive, and self-aware.

The most original coming-of-age story from the Middle East yet.

Elegant, simple panels tell this story of growth, loneliness, and homecoming with poignant charm and wit.

Humorous and heartbreaking . . . A welcome look beind the headlines and into the heart and mind of one very wise, wicked, and winning young woman.

Scary, moving, and etched out with a simplicity that speaks volumes. The artist is less a talent than a force.

Irresistible . . . Satrapi’s story is too important—and too fascinating—to let go of.

Powerful . . . A great, engaging tale . . . As deeply satisfying as a good, old-fashioned prose novel and as visually delightful as old picture books from childhood.

Every revolution needs a chronicler like Satrapi.

It is our good fortune that Satrapi has never stopped visiting Iran in her mind.

Persepolis 2 is much more than the chronicle of a young woman’s struggle into adulthood; it’s a brilliant, painful, rendering of the contrast between East and West, between the repression of wartime Iran and the social, political, and sexual freedoms of 1980’s Austria. There’s something universal about Satrapi’s search for self-definition, but her experiences in Vienna and Tehran are rendered with such witty particularity, and such heartbreaking honesty, that by the end of this book you’ll feel you’ve gained an intimate friend.

Marjane Satrapi’s books are a revelation. They’re funny, they’re sad, they’re hugely readable. Most importantly, they remind you that the media sometimes tell you the facts but rarely tell you the truth. In one afternoon Persepolis will teach you more about Iran, about being an outsider, about being human, than you could learn from a thousand hours of television documentaries and newspaper articles. And you will remember it for a very long time.

“Delectable. . . Dances with drama and insouciant wit.” –

A stunning graphic memoir hailed as a wholly original achievement in the form. There’s still a startling freshness to the book. It won’t age. In inky shadows and simple, expressive lines— reminiscent of Ludwig Bemelmans’s “Madeline”—Satrapi evokes herself and her schoolmates coming of age in a world of protests and disappearances . . . A stark, shocking impact.

A dazzlingly singular achievement. . . . Striking a perfect balance between the fantasies and neighborhood conspiracies of childhood and the mounting lunacy of Khomeini’s reign, she’s like the Persian love child of Spiegelman and Lynda Barry.

A brilliant and unusual graphic memoir. . . . [Told] in a guileless voice . . . accompanied by a series of black-and-white drawings that dramatically illustrate how a repressive regime deforms ordinary lives.

Odds are, you’ll be too busy being entertained to realize how much you’ve learned until you turn the last page.

[A] self-portrait of the artist as a young girl, rendered in graceful black-and-white comics that apply a childlike sensibility to the bleak lowlights of recent Iranian history. . . . [Her] style is powerful; it persuasively communicates confusion and horror through the eyes of a precocious preteen.

This is an excellent comic book, that deserves a place with Joe Sacco and even Art Spiegelman. In her bold black and white panels, Satrapi eloquently reasserts the moral bankruptcy of all political dogma and religious conformity; how it bullies, how it murders, and how it may always be ridiculed by individual rebellions of the spirit and the intellect.

You’ve never seen anything like Persepolis—the intimacy of a memoir, the irresistability of a comic book, and the political depth of a the conflict between fundamentalism and democracy. Marjane Satrapi may have given us a new genre.

I grew up reading the Mexican comics of Gabriel Vargas, graduated to the political teachings of Rius, fell under the spell of Linda Barry, Art Spiegelman, and now I am a fan of Marjane Satrapi. Her stories thrummed in my heart for days. Persepolis is part history book, part Scheherazade, astonishing as only true stories can be. I learned much about the history of Iran, but more importantly, it gave me hope for humanity in these unkind times.

I thought [Persepolis] was a superb piece of work, not only for the child’s eye view—the developing child’s eye view—of a society unknown to many of us in the west, and feared and suspected in proportion to being unknown…. Satrapi has found a way of depicting human beings that is both simple and immediately comprehensible, AND is almost infinitely flexible. Anyone who’s tried to draw a simplified version of a human face knows how immensely difficult it is not only to give the faces a range of expression, but also to maintain identities from one frame to the next. It’s an enormous technical accomplishment.

I cannot praise enough Marjane Satrapi’s moving account of growing up as a spirited young girl in revolutionary and war-time Iran. Persepolis is disarming and often humorous but ultimately it is shattering.

This witty, moving and illuminating book demonstrates graphically why the future of Iran lies with neither the clerics nor the American Empire.

I found the work immensely moving with depths of nuance and wisdom that one might never expect to find in a comic book. It’s a powerful, mysterious, enchanting story that manages to reflect a great swath of Iranian contemporary history within the sensitive, intimate tale of a young girl’s coming-of-age. I didn’t want it to end!

A rare and chilling memoir that offers every reader a personal, honest portrait of Iran’s recent political and cultural history. Ms. Satrapi’s provocative, graphic narrative of life in Iran before and after the Islamic revolution is an extraordinary testament to the level of human suffering experienced by Iranians tossed from one political hypocrisy to another. Aside from the humanistic dimension, the beautifully minimalist Persepolis gives further evidence of Marjane Satrapi’s sensitivity and superb skill as an artist.

Readers who have always wanted to look beyond political headlines and CNN’s cliches should plunge into this unique illustrated story. Let Marji be your trusted companion, follow her into the warmth of a Persian home and out along Tehran’s turbulent streets during those heady days of revolution. Persepolis opens a rare door to understanding of events that still haunt America, while shining a bright light on the personal humanity and humor so much alive in Iranian families today.

Blending the historical with the personal is not an easy task, to blend the individual with the universal is even more challenging. But Marjane Satrapi has succeeded brilliantly. This graphic novel is a reminder of the human spirit that fights oppression and death, it is a witness to something true and lasting which is more affective than hundreds of news broadcasts.