Goodbye Marjane Satrapi (1969-2026): Your graphic odes to unceasing rebellion are everlasting

She died of sadness, her close ones reported. Marjane Satrapi had spent her entire working life insisting that sentiment was not the opposite of seriousness – that love, properly understood, was a form of intelligence about the world. The news reporting that she had died of grief after the death of her husband, the Swedish producer Mattias Ripa, confirmed that the maverick artist, wilful till the end, had earned the right to name her own death.

She is survived, of course, by Persepolis. The graphic memoir, first published in French by the small Parisian collective L'Association between 2000 and 2001, was later translated into English (in 2003 by Ripa and Blake Ferris), and in 2004 (by Anjali Singh). It has now achieved that peculiar afterlife reserved for books that become shortcuts for entire historical epochs. L'Association had built a reputation for avant-garde memoirs that disrupted Franco-Belgian convention, and the four French Persepolis instalments sold well enough to keep the collective afloat through difficult years.

The collected graphic novel (a term Satrapi famously rebuked) now instantly conjures an understanding of the 1979 Iranian Revolution, the Iran-Iraq War, the compulsory veil, and the so-called moral police. Its two volumes span a journey from innocence to experience premised on the claustrophobia of being a...

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