In the following excerpt, Kutschera explains that Satrapi began writing and publishing her Persepolis comic strip in order to educate the world about Iranian culture.

Marjane Satrapi is no ordinary young woman, she is a full fledged princess. And not only a princess, but what some people might call a 'Red princess': born into a progressive family, she was reading cartoons about Marxism when other children were reading fairy tales. Her maternal grandfather was the son of Nasreddine Shah, the last Qadjar emperor of Iran.

Growing up, she was surrounded by relatives and family friends regularly thrown into jail for being communists. Today, she holds no brief for either the Islamic regime or the monarchy it displaced.

The child of intellectual parents, she was sent to Europe in the mid-1980s, at the age of 14, to be spared the oppression of an Islamic regime then at its...