The Complete Persepolis | Chapters 1-8

Satrapi's images and drawings often convey more meaning than her text does alone. Since she is writing a graphic novel, she had a a limited amount of space for her text, so she relies on her art to speak for her instead. The larger panels will often display a scene, generally one that is a bigger picture and larger than just Satrapi's story on its own, more likely portraying the Revolution as a whole. The images are all in black and white, so the panels that are from outside what would have been Satrapi's perspective tend to mostly use black, while the other images are a stark contrast and use mostly white space. Satrapi uses text bubbles to explain thoughts from the timeline of the story, while the captions tend to be from the older Satrapi, who speaks with more knowledge of the Revolution and also knowing the effect that it will have on her and her family late on and than the timeline in the story. Together the dialogue and images work to create a complete story. Trying to understand the graphic novel without both dialogue and the images would leave large pieces of the story missing since the two are intricately woven together in order to tell Satrapi's story during the Revolution in Iran.