Marjane Satrapi, the face behind the award-winning “Persepolis” book series and recent film adaptation, brought the same charm and sense of humor to Iowa City that helped make her books an international success.Using powerful black-and-white comic strip images in “Persepolis,” Satrapi, 39, tells the story of her youth in Iran in the 1970s and ’80s, of living through the Islamic revolution and Iran’s war with Iraq. It is a book about childhood beset by the unthinkable, but buffered by an extraordinary and loving family. “Persepolis” was published in four volumes in France, where it met with enormous critical acclaim, and published as two volumes in the United States: “Persepolis” and “Persepolis 2.” It has also has been translated into 24 languages.

“Humor was the only way I could write this story,” Satrapi told over 700 people gathered at the Iowa Memorial Union on the University of Iowa campus to hear her lecture April 6. “I use humor to fight cynicism. We cry for the same reasons, but we don’t always laugh for the same reasons. To understand why someone is laughing, you really have to understand their spirit in order to connect to them.”

To illustrate her point, Satrapi used her experiences when she first came to America and tried to understand American humor. “I didn’t understand American jokes at first and wondered why people were laughing at what I thought were crap jokes,” Satrapi said. “But nobody laughed at my jokes either, and it wasn’t until I understood American jokes that I really felt connected to the people.”

Satrapi made two things very clear at the beginning of her lecture: First, she would have to take a five-minute smoke break between the lecture and book signing; second, she prefers “comics” to “graphic novels” when talking about her work. “When I think of graphic novels, I think of ‘Lady Chatterly’s Lover,’” she said. “It’s so bourgeois.”

Satrapi theorized that the “graphic novel” was created by publishers so adults would not be ashamed reading comics. “I prefer comics, because comics come from popular art and everyone can understand it.”

However, Satrapi did not always harbor a love of comics, despite their vast availability in Iran during the ’70s. Her interest wasn’t sparked until she turned 24, when she received a copy of Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel, “Maus,” which used mice to depict the Holocaust in Germany.

As fate would have it, Satrapi befriended Spiegelman after “Persepolis” was first published in America in 2003. Critics hailed “Persepolis” as the new “Maus,” which took Satrapi by surprise. “I was very shy and being compared to my master didn’t make much sense to me,” she said. “I called him and told him that I wasn’t making these comparisons but the journalists, who don’t have much imagination.”

There’s a reason why Satrapi didn’t become interested in comics until her 20s. She was scarred by an experience when she was 7, which involved her younger cousin and the comic book “Dracula.” Despite her limited English, Satrapi rendered her own interpretation of the comic, which involved eating raw chicken to keep from becoming Dracula. The rest of the summer was spent stealing small pieces of raw chicken, resulting in a case of worms. “So it was worms that turned me off to comics,” she said.

Satrapi’s notoriety has grown exponentially with the recent award-winning film adaptation of “Persepolis.” The animated film, released in the United States in December, has garnered huge international acclaim and won the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival; this year it was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Animated Feature Film and won two Cesar Awards (the French version of the Oscars) for Best First Film and Best Adaptation.

“Persepolis” Film Trailer

Satrapi claims the movie idea was not hers at all, and when the propositions kept coming from Hollywood, she kept making lots of demands, thinking they wouldn’t be agreed to. And when they were met, she said, “Shit, now I have to make movie.”

The biggest challenge adapting the comic book to film, Satrapi said, was trying to blend the two different mediums without losing the book’s meaning. “It was like working with two different languages,” she said. “When reading comics, you have to actively use your imagination, especially between frames, but watching a movie is passive. Everything is there and you don’t have to do anything.”

Another challenge for Satrapi was having to collaborate with a lot of people as opposed to working alone. “At first I remember wanting to kill all of these people,” she confessed.

During the latter part of the lecture, Satrapi shared her experiences growing up in Iran, her exile to France and her perceptions of the current conflicts involving Iran. Before her parents helped her escape to Austria from what they called the oppressive regime of Iran in the early ’80s, Satrapi had already endured four years of the new government.

“In the ’80s Iran was the image of evil, and I could not escape this when I left the country. And now Iran is only a part of the ‘Axis of Evil,’ so things are improving,” Satrapi kidded.

Satrapi said that the first time she left Iran in ‘84, she had to explain everything about her past to satisfy any suspicions. Knowing her audience, Satrapi used this moment to take a subtle jab at President George W. Bush. “Every time left Iran, I had to explain everything about my past,” she said. “I had to keep reminding people that in a democracy, the leaders of are not representative of all the people in the country. You know about that, right?”

“When I first left Iran, I was very angry and wanted revenge,” Satrapi said. “I needed some distance from my experiences to write the book how I thought it needed to be written. I needed time to offer myself some luxury, and during this time, I came to realize that when I was angry and full of hate, I was no different than my oppressors.”

During this incubation period, Satrapi drew distinctions between individuals and groups of people and how the abstraction of groups depersonalizes the human experience. “In my work I try to humanize people, despite the dehumanizing of people in Iran,” Satrapi said. “We call groups Middle Easterners, terrorists and fanatics, instead of talking about them as human beings anymore. If we talk about people as human beings, it makes it more difficult to go out and bomb them. If 50 or 60 people die, who cares? since they are not human beings anymore but an abstract.”

In the post-9/11 era, Satrapi says that our leaders make us believe that democracy is a color in which we can paint the world, and worse, that democracy is a gift we can give by bombing and killing people.

“When I first came to America in 1999, I came here believing and wanting to believe that Americans were the worst people in the world. This is how I raised,” she said “However, the first time I came to America, it was a big slap in the face, because I met a lot of wonderful people. The second time a bigger slap, and slaps got bigger with each visit thereafter.”

Satrapi ended her lecture by sharing the one single thing she believes in: Education and Culture. “It is always better to be less stupid than more stupid.”