Luc Sante's New York Times review of Persepolis 2 suggests that Satrapi's artwork alludes to Matisse. But there's a much more significant influence on her work: her teacher and mentor, the French cartoonist David B., whose masterwork Epileptic will be published in its entirety in English for the first time early next year. (Here's a panel from it.) Epileptic is a memoir, too, but it deals with the disjunctions between the way its characters perceive the world and the way the world actually works; the young David B. sees everything in elaborate visual metaphors. There are hints, in Persepolis, of the way Epileptic casually conflates symbolic and representational images, and Satrapi's bold, high-contrast drawings owe an obvious debt to B.'s.