« Just Wanted To Say... | Main | Comic Analysis »
October 16, 2005
Persepolis
I have to admit that I had alot of preconceptions about Persepolis. The truth is that I have been dodging this book for about a year now. Last year I had an exchange student from Turkey stay with me for the school year (who I miss soooo much!!), and she read this book and urged me again and again to read it. For some reason, though (and I consider this extremely dumb now), I did not see this as the kind of book that I would read. I had ideas of myself as a reader and I knew that I did not read comics. A few months later a friend of my mother's who I usually "trade" books with suggested it and again I shrugged it off. So, now that we "have" to read it for LCIS I decided to give it a try, and I am glad I did.
I think that many people (including myself) have the conception of comics as less literature than, for example, novels or poems. I think this has alot to do with the what the Introduction to the Practices of Looking textbook said, that there is a dispute between "fine art" and "modern art" and the study of each. I definetely would not have called myself a "Picky Reader", but I guess I am, and I am frankly really ashamed of it. Anyways, the moral of the story is that I am really glad that I had to read Persepolis not only because of its historical implications, but also because of the type of literature it represents. I really enjoyed it.
**Sorry for the long entry again.
Posted by lciscotis at October 16, 2005 04:21 PM
Comments
I also always associated comics with jokes and light subject matter, therefore reading a comic book about war and revolution seemed strange to me as well. I now understand why Marjane Satrapi decided to write Persepolis as a comic...each illustration conveys so much meaning that it would probably take a page or so of writing to get across the same idea, and still some of the emotion in the picture might be lost. Although Persepolis took no time at all to read, the story does not seem short to me. On the other hand I feel like I have taken in the same amount of information as I would have had this been a 300 page novel. I also found that reading this book definitely corrected some of the preconceptions I had about comic books.
Posted by: Brenna S. at October 17, 2005 07:39 PM
I think the fact that reading a comic book about war and conflict like this one is just surprising as a whole. At first i thought the author was making light of an intense subject matter but we know that it was better to have recieved the subject matter in this way. I think we will remember the information more now that we saw it and read it.
Posted by: Jessica Y at October 18, 2005 04:54 PM