Hello readers,

This week in my ASTU class we have been reading Persepolis: The story of a childhood, the graphic memoir by the Iranian-born French comic book artist and filmmaker Marjane Satrapi. Satrapi uses her former self, young Marji, to recount her experiences of growing up during the highly stigmatized 1979 Islamic Revolution and the following Iran-Iraq war. In doing so, the reader is reintroduced to these historic events from an unconventional and perhaps previously unheard perspective – that of a young girl from a “modern and avant-garde” family (Perspolis, 6). While the content of the work can stand alone as an impressive mix of political commentary, historical allusions and of course, a child’s personal wartime narrative, what makes Satrapi’s Persepolis so powerful is the way that she has expressed this heavy content through the dynamic comic book form.

As we were discussing in class today, the effectiveness of the comic as a genre has become a hot topic in academia, particularly since the esteemed comic book artist Art Spiegelman shocked the literary world in 1992 when his work Maus: A Survivor’s Tale became the first – and to date only – comic to win a Pulitzer Prize. Thus, relative to the serious analysis of this medium that exists (for example, Scott McCloud’s highly acclaimed work Understanding Comics) and to the abundant cult comic sub cultures out there, my own understanding of this form and the world of comics is very limited. Yet still, I find the medium to be incredibly fascinating. For the sake of brevity, this blog post will not focus on the effectiveness of the comic medium in portraying narratives, but rather on how the comic genre plays into conversations about the art industry and its socio-economic relationship to class.

In an interview uploaded by the YouTube channel I Am Film, Satrapi accredits her use of the comic genre to her “love” of “popular art”. Expanding on this, she continues by saying “I didn’t want to make some paintings that would go to some galleries and then some elite peoples would come and watch my paintings and that would be it… I said I can make something that would be popular and not stupid.”

Interestingly enough however, my own exposure to the comic medium has primarily been through these very gallery settings. In 2008 I saw KRAZY, the dynamic summer exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery which centred around comics, graphic novels and other such genres, and last spring I saw the Art Spiegelman’s CO-MIX: A Retrospective show at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Thus my personal exposure to the art form that Satrapi intentionally uses in order to create “popular art” has been through institutions that generally align themselves with more “serious” “high art”. This is interesting because it reflects a certain trend in the art world in which popular art, like comics, has come to be coopted by previously separate domains of high art, like the gallery.

I have to admit that at times I am somewhat skeptical of so-called popular art. Popular art is inherently associated with mass culture and therefore its mass appeal can make it an easy target for the corporate world to appropriate – art that appeals to a big market is art that can turn a huge profit. Thus popular art as a form helps contribute to the increasing commercialization and trivialization of art and culture (for a similar account of this idea explore the Frankfurt School theorists Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer and their theory of The Culture Industry). For example, when thumbing through The New York Times Magazine one may encounter ads for Jeff Koons (the iconic American artist) edition Dom Perignon. Seen from one perspective the Koons bottles represent popular art, seen from another this collaboration is mere brand building for both artist and corporation. Yet Satrapi proves my cynicism to be too simplistic by reviving a still beautiful, uncorrupted side of the popular art form – a side in which popular art and more specifically the comic genre is used to create something powerful for everyone to experience.

Playing devil’s advocate one more time however, to what extent is the comic genre actually distanced from the classism that exists in the rest of the art world? Traditionally, comics are often associated with youth culture – think of the weekend funnies in the newspaper or of any iconic superhero series. Thus, in one way the comic represents a sensorial form that is unpretentious, relatively inexpensive and easily accessible to a popular audience. In another sense however, comics can also be associated with a political, highbrow and generally wealthy class – take the political cartoons and comics produced for publications like The New York Times and Charlie Hebdo. The highly erudite comic perhaps is not a “popular art” form because it is only distributed to and only intended to be interpreted by a certain elite class.

The real significance of works like Satrapi’s Persepolis and Spiegelman’s Maus then becomes that they effectively bridge these two worlds of comics and use the popular art form to transcend the potential elitism in the art world. They document political and historical commentary onto an unpretentious page. As Satrapi says in the I Am Film interview, “it is possible to make something that everybody can read but is well made.” In this synthesis something truly incredible is created. Using the genre of the comic book to explore often taboo and traumatic issues takes an incredible amount of artistic bravery. If one thinks of Theodor Adorno’s famous declaration that “it is barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz”, one has to celebrate Spiegelman’s courage to go on to use not the poem but the even more stylized form of the comic book to recount his parents experience of the Holocaust in Maus. Likewise, Satrapi’s work is equally poignant. She utilizes the comic to represent the best (and not the commercial) aspects of the popular art form – she cuts through demographic blockades to reach a wide audience with her strong voice and powerful pen.