Week 11: Comics as Contemporary LIterature

I’ve always wondered how people who weren’t into art would appreciate comics, and now I’m glad to know that they are slowly becoming a medium which is becoming more and more accepted over time. Growing up, I admit that I was among the people who had thought of comics as a form of entertainment which, if popular enough, might get its own movie or animated series. I hadn’t really taken them seriously before, though I changed my mind after reading enough of them as I got older.

One of the first comics I read that wasn’t purely for entertainment was Perspecolis. My mother had bought the book for me and asked me to read it. I had no idea what it was about before reading its contents, but I had heard of it before. To say that it surprised me would be something of an understatement. I was used to humorous comics with tales of adventure; jumping into the world of Persepolis was a huge leap from what I was used to.

All the same, I appreciated Persepolis simply from the medium it came from. I liked comics a lot, and the fact that Persepolis was nothing like the other comics I’d read did little to stop me from liking it. The subject matter was very grave and gave me a lot of insight into Iranian culture. I thought it was interesting reading about how the revolution affected so many lives, and I felt bad for those who were executed for being spies.

It also gave me a lot of insight into the way Iranian culture treated women. Many cultures believe women to be of a lower social standing than men, and I noticed that this trend was also very much present in Iranian culture. I also noticed that social standing had a lot to do with what you could do in life. The part with the maid, for one, was quite interesting to me for that reason. That the other boy lost interest in her completely after discovering that she was a maid subverts a lot of tropes I was used to seeing in other media.

Among the many scenes that I have seen, I thought the part where Marji tried to sit in the bathtub for a long time to feel what her grandfather felt while being tortured struck out to me as one of the more memorable scenes. In general it was a pretty heavy read at the age of when I first read it, but reading it again has given me a better understanding and appreciation for it.