Women in comics [La Perdida and Persepolis]

La Perdida and Persepolis

The one thing these two comics have in common is the gender of the writers and the gender of the main characters, which happen to be one and the same. The character and personalities of the protagonists are very different, which is why I found Persepolis far more entertaining than La Perdida.

Its not like La Perdida is a bad story. It’s a tale of a Mexican American girl trying to “get in touch” with her “Mexican roots”. It’s basically her jealous that her father (who divorced her mother) took her brother to live with him in Mexico, and so now that her life has hit a lull, and she’s in between boyfriends, she decides to travel to Mexico and stay with an old ex-boyfriend. She basically acts like a tourist and then denies it the entire time. She looses herself to her “new” life with her pathetic boyfriend, and his drug-dealing friends. Her vivacity visibly slips, as the story progresses, only to be regained when her brother visits and drags her out of the hole she slipped into.

I found it relatively interesting, that is, until she lost herself and all herself awareness of her situation. Carla just is on the weaker end of the food chain, and has no knowledge of her standing. She willfully confines herself to the lower teir of the population, thinking of them as the only “true” Mexicans. Her generalization of the Mexican population is an egregious error on her part, and rather stereotypical. In her desperate attempt to be a Mexican, she remains ever a gringa. It’s ironic, but true.

Carla’s personality was the sole reason I didn’t care for La Perdida. I’m glad she learned a lot through her experience in Mexico, but she should have learned it earlier. Though on the upside, I loved relearning all the Mexican slang that I’d lost.

Persepolis, unlike La Perdida, is autobiographical. It tells Marjane Satrapi’s story of her childhood in a revolutionary Iran. That being said, Satrapi’s portrayal of herself is rather interesting. She somehow comes off as a very likeable character. Her strength and audacity to speak out against the government at her age, though it may be a direct influence of her parents, makes her very likeable. But she still has her childlike innocence and naivety, when suggesting beating up the son of a government official.

Maybe its because I only read volume 1, and she had not yet reached her teen years, nor her twenties, but Satrapi as a character is very sure of herself.