Cartoons and Specific Meaning

One thing that I found interesting while reading Persepolis was Satrapi's occasional depiction of sayings or common phrases in images. For example, the narrator talks about the idea that "To die a martyr is to inject blood into the veins of society" (115). Beneath this quote there is an image of a man screaming in pain, blood flowing from holes in his arms. Satrapi has created an image for words that, even if they are meant to evoke a certain image, are not necessarily as powerful or as specific as the picture. Hearing this quote, we might come up with a vague mental image of tubes of blood flowing into a great shadowy arm (at least I do...), but with her illustration, Satrapi makes this idea personal on a level that the text does not. She is depicting a specific man and a specific pain, even while the simplified image of the cartoon allows her audience to put themselves in the place of the man. The textual statement allows us to think generally of martyrs, but the picture forces us to consider ourselves as potential martyrs. And that is a much more frightening idea, when the image is one of fear and pain. It seems like the special power of cartoons is to specify by generalizing, if that makes sense. They create images that are simple and relatable (general), and therefore render certain ideas more specific to the reader.