Salon talks with Satrapi

Salon.com sat down with Persepolis and Embroideries graphic novelist Marjane Satrapi to talk...mainly about politics and sex (just a caveat there). Raised in a Marxist family under mullah rule, she has an interesting perspective on the current U.S. situation and how religion works with politics.

The life she draws -- with her cosmopolitan, politically engaged parents, her adolescent obsession with punk rock, her search for solace in books and boyfriends -- is typical of well-off, precocious city kids everywhere. The familiarity makes readers feel the Satrapi family's horrified disbelief as fundamentalists obsessed with sex and death take over their country.

Having spent her formative years in Iran before going to private school in Europe, her work has up until this point focused on the dialectic models of contradictory cultural norms that have ultimately formed who she is. Getting her take on U.S. politics here sheds light on an entirely new dimension, showing how she is inherently wary of theocratic encroachment on democracy.

They're the same! George Bush and the mullahs of Iran, they use the same words! The mullahs of Iran say we have God on our side; he has God on his side, too. Both of them are convinced that they are going to eradicate evil in the world. But when these words come out of the mouth of a mullah, it's normal. It's a shame that the president of the biggest secular democracy in the world talks with the same words as the mullahs. It's extremely scary.

It's heated, and it's gloves off, but it's Satrapi through and through.