John Wayne's Blog

                     Persepolis is a graphic novel by Marjane Satrapi. It is an autobiography of her childhood and adult life in Iran. During that time of her life, the Islamic Revolution was going on. And we can see in the novel that how the Islamic Revolution effected her early life. The Islamic Revolution involves lots of significant events, and one of the most significant events is overthrowing the continuous Persian monarchy under Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi. Most of the movements were supported by the U.S. At that time, terrible things were happening. As a child, Satrapi was forced to face problem created by the political issue during that time. Such as wearing a veil, using and presenting the foreign product, and even her life was being threatened on a daily base. After reading Persepolis, I feel sympathy for Satrapi. Not only the terrible things happen, but they also don't go away because they have deeply affected her life and changed her. In the second volume, we can obviou

               Over the years living in the U.S, I have seen much differences. I am very sensitive to these differences mainly because I came from a conserved country, and In my mind, America is much more open. Besides that, I believe the greatest difference I felt between my country and the U.S is people in the U.S are willing to speak up for themselves. The book March is an example for that idea. The Civil   Rights has been a serious question for decays now. March is a comic talking about the early stage of the Civil Rights movement. The story is being presented through the perspective of the U.S Congressman John Lewis and the leaders of the Civil Rights movement. There are three volumes of March. They each talk about the same things but through a different person's perspective of view. That is a very interesting way of presenting a story because we can see how things can vary between different people with different identities.

                   After reading the Maus again, I have new thoughts in mind. I have read Maus back in high school. When I was reading the book back then, I did not like it. It is a comic talking about the German holocaust-- presenting a cruel story only using such a "simple" medium. I believed the horrible and terrible things happened in that part of the world at that time, should have been presented with something that is more "complex" and more "matured". However, I changed my mind as I read Maus the second time. Spiegelman talks about his dad's (Vladek)story during the Holocaust. How has he "lived" through and how could he be alive.                    He used rats to symbolizing Jewish, used cats to symbolizing German, pigs as Poles, frog as French, and dogs as American. I believe these are a really good symbolization of the condition at that time. Predator and prey, cat hunts the mice, and German kill the Jewish. It is very effective fo

                    After reading the underground comics, I believe those comic were clarified as "underground" not only because of information they contain, it was the people starting to realize those kinds of thing should not appear in comic. Comics were mainly sold to children, and children should not be exposed to violence, sex, and drugs. They would terribly influence their unmatured minds.