Iran election inspires Persepolis “sequel”

Two Iranian exiles, known only as Sina and Payman, have remixed Marjane Satrapi’s graphic novel Persepolis to depict the recent weeks of political unrest in Iran following the June 12 election. Called “Persepolis 2.0,” the updated cartoon was created by rearranging panels within Satrapi’s original work and adding new text, with the intention of showing how history is repeating itself in Iran. Co-creator Sina explains to The Guardian why he chose to update Persepolis:

Satrapi’s novels are about her life, but to my generation of Iranians (at least in the west) they have become more than that: they have become iconic. The fact that images from 30 years ago can tell a story about what is happening now makes them all the more powerful.

Although not directly involved in the update, Satrapi gave permission for Sina and Payman to expand on her work. “Persepolis 2.0″ can be read online and in a PDF at the Spread Persepolis web site.

Persepolis author Marjane Satrapi joins fight against Iranian “coup d’état”

The National Post points us to a story in ADN Kronos about Persepolis author (and director of the film version) Marjane Satrapi’s efforts to expose what many believe was an enormous electoral fraud in last week’s Iranian presidential election:

Two Iranian filmmakers on Tuesday presented a document to Green Party MPs in the European parliament claiming to show that defeated presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi had received over 19 million votes in the weekend election.

Marjane Satrapi, Iranian author and director and Mohsen Makhmalbaf, an Iranian filmmaker and Mousavi spokesman, presented a document that they claimed had come from the Iranian electoral commission.

The document said liberal cleric and former parliament speaker Mehdi Karroubi came second in the election with a total of 13.3 million votes, while president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad came third with only 5.49 million votes.

However, there is no certainty about the legitimacy of the document.

“Ahmadinejad received only 12 percent of the vote, not 65 percent,” said Marjane Satrapi, who was the director of Oscar-nominated film Persepolis.

The coming year in memoir fraud

We here at Quillblog remember a day – back when we were young and having remarkable and poignant experiences we reserve the right to one day lay out in book form – when memoirs were expected to be at least within the neighbourhood of the truth. In these relativist times, however, when the boundaries between “truth” and “fiction” are just about non-existent, a memoir is most commonly defined as “a novel, told in the first person, that sells a hell of a lot of copies.”

Over at Slate, Meghan O’Rourke wonders how the hell this all came to be. Slate also give us a sneak peek at the memoir scandals we can expect to see over the next couple of months, including at-last revealed stretchers from St. Augustine (“’There’s just no reason to believe that the thornbushes of lust ever grew rank about his head,’ says historian Carlo Ricci….”) and Persepolis author Marjane Satrapi (“Satrapi does in fact have both lips and eyelids. She also confessed to ‘completely making up the whole two-dimension thing.’”).

On the graphic memoir

The Philadelphia Inquirer recently posted an article on its website about the rise of graphic memoirs, or memoirs in comic book form. This news itself isn’t so noteworthy: with numerous autobiographically inspired books like Art Spiegelman’s Maus (published in 1992), Chester Brown’s I Never Liked You (1994), Craig Thompson’s Blankets (2003), and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis books already in existence, memoirs have long been a staple category in the comix genre. What’s interesting is the continuing acceptance of the form mainstream publishers, as shown by the glut of graphic memoirs slated for release this year from conventional trade publishers like HarperCollins, Knopf, and Houghton Mifflin.

The other thing that’s unusual is that the exact subject matter of these new memoirs differs somewhat from the traditional historical and youth romance paragons of the genre. Houghton Mifflin’s upcoming release is Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, about Bechdel’s closeted gay father and her childhood spent in the family funeral home, while Dragonslippers, by Rosalind B. Penfold, is about an abusive relationship. (The latter was first published in Canada by Penguin Canada.) There are also three new graphic novels that take personal looks at cancer.

Related links:
Click here for the piece from the Philadelphia Inquirer