Persepolis has been compared with Art Spiegelman's Maus by reviewers with few other reference points for "serious" comics. It's a poor comparison, though. Spiegelman doesn't just repeat his father's story of surviving the Holocaust—he interprets and refracts it at every turn, especially in the context of his own relationship with his father, and questions what his alterations mean to the narrative and to the way he presents history. Satrapi, conversely, tells her story almost straight, one anecdote following another. There's very little explicit interpretive spin in Persepolis, and not much that binds its incidents together except that they all happened to Satrapi; the impression she tries to give is that she's documenting the way her experiences seemed to her at the time. That worked well in the first volume's account of her childhood, and it makes some sense in the early pages of Persepolis 2, where she's still a wide-eyed teenager.