Wednesday, 8:17am
1 July 2009

Persepolis 2.0

Marjane Satrapi’s graphic novel is detourned to chart new events in Iran

Appropriations and detournements are a time-honoured tradition in comics, writes Roger Sabin. The 1930s Tijuana Bibles took Popeye and put him in pornographic storylines, a 1970s underground comic made Beryl the Peril a symbol of abortion rights, and who could forget 1988’s Breaking Free, with Tintin as an anarchist agitator. Now comes Persepolis re-imagined as a comment on Iran’s post-election uprising, spreadpersepolis.com.

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It’s not known if Marjane Satrapi (see our interview in Eye 50) approves of the comic, which is entitled Persepolis 2.0 and re-uses drawings from the original, though she’d probably approve of the sentiments.

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