Images Tell a Story of Their Own

My perception towards comic novels started to change when I read Maus. Before, I associated comic books with children and super heroes, but now I connote them with creativity and surprises because you never know what that comic novel can be about. I just started reading Persepolis (comic memoir) by Marjane Satrapi and it is no different. It is the memoir of a young girl growing up in Iran during the Islamic Revolution.

Opening a comic book is similar to opening a regular book; you don’t know what you are going to find. At first I didn’t know what to expect about Persepolis. I looked at the front cover and I knew that it had to do with the Middle East due to the picture of a girl with a burka. Then I started passing those black and white images and found that it had to do with some kind of revolution and hectic time. Being able to decipher what the comic was going to be about by just looking at the images was very cool, I felt as if I was in third grade again; in a good way. Its funny to think that when I was little all I wanted to do was to be all grown up, and read a 500 page novel, whereas today the uniqueness of comic books is what’s brightening up my reading.

What most stood out to me was that the images are straight to the point just like the dialogue. It shows and says exactly what is necessary so that the reader can feel what Satrapi was feeling at the time. What give it a more realistic feeling to the comic, is that there is no remorse. For example, on top of page 52, there is a big picture of a man cut into pieces, and all the quotation says is “In the end he was cut to pieces” (52).  When I saw this image it made my legs feel weird and I sensed a feeling of disgust. These images make the reader approach the comic with pathos, which Satrapi intelligently utilizes so that the reader, like myself gets hooked to the book. Now I always want to know what will come next, but with caution because it’s full of surprises.