‘Persepolis’ Author Says ‘A Banned Book ... is a Good Book’

When author and artist Marjane Satrapi first published Persepolis, her graphic memoir of growing up in Iran, she didn’t expect it to become one of the most important graphic novels ever penned.

“It was 2000,” she told me via Zoom from her home in Paris, “and I thought maybe the book would work a couple of years and that would be it. But that was before 2001, September, and George Bush came. Trump was such an asshole that now George Bush looks like this nice guy, but he’s a war criminal.”

Within a few years, the United States had WMDed its way deep into the Middle East. At some point along the way, Dick Cheney—presumably while slumbering in a coffin—had dreamed or nightmared up the so-called “Axis of Evil” comprised of Iraq, North Korea, and Iran—three countries that, for all relevant purposes, had nothing to do with one another. Warmongering nonsense or not, it placed the crosshairs on Iran and, consequently, the spotlight on Persepolis and Satrapi, who became an outspoken critic of the administration, likening the religious fundamentalism of Bush to that of the Mullahs in Iran.

Read more at The Daily Beast.