Persepolis is not what I had expected so far. I would have to say the reason Marjane Satrapi wrote it in comic book form is because this is an unrelatable topic to many people. As a white, American female, I can't connect with the events happening; I wasn't even alive for most of them. The comic strip makes the text interesting because I can see how the author visualized what was happening around her. But because this little girl basically only has two eyes, a nose, a line for a mouth, and a blob of hair, it's really easy for me to be sucked into her world.
I also find it fascinating how she makes herself sound so childlike. When most people write memoirs such as this, we get it from the adult perspective, looking back at the things they've done/had done to them. We get to see such a serious event, that we've all heard about, in comic strip form. Not that it isn't something we should all know about anyway, but both the perspective and concept basic caricatures given to the reader makes it easily relatable to the masses.
I agree that Satrapi's art style makes the content of her book relatable even to people as far removed from such a situation as ourselves. I would go even further to say that the cartoonish art style supports the childlike voice with which Satrapi has chosen to write. If she had written with more sophistication, the combination of art style and voice would potentially jar us out of our relationship to her story.
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