PARIS: Cartoons have long featured super heroes, evil scientists and ruthless villains, but in the world’s first Iranian comic strip, the hero is a little girl who lives through the country’s Islamic revolution.

In stark black and white drawings and deceptively simple prose, Paris-based author Marjane Satrapi recounts her childhood in Tehran, the overthrow of the Shah by radicals in 1979 and the eight-year war with neighbouring Iraq.

Despite its bleak subject matter, “Persepolis” has sold close to 150,000 copies in France and the United States, where it was published in April at the height of the war against Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.

A child’s eye view of events, laced with wry humour and telling detail, it has been compared to “Maus”, Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel on the Holocaust.

An opening panel shows the girls at Satrapi’s school reacting with baffled amusement to the news that they have to wear a veil. One pretends to be a monster hiding under the black cloth, another uses the fabric as an impromptu skipping rope.

Despite the rave reviews that have greeted her work, the 33-year-old author had low expectations for her book tour in the United States, whose government has branded Iran a member of an “axis of evil” supporting terrorism with North Korea and Iraq.

“I was convinced that I was like Don Quixote, heading out to battle against windmills, that I was going to come back a complete misanthropist,” Satrapi told Reuters in an interview. “Once I was on US soil, it was a completely different story.”

The story of Marji, the rebellious teenager who has to hide her Michael Jackson badge and Nike trainers from the guardians of Muslim morality, resonated with readers across the Atlantic.

At a signing session in Texas, a local man berated Satrapi for opposing the war in Iraq. Moments later, he was queuing for autographs with an armful of books.

“I said to him: ‘You bought seven copies?’ and he said: ‘Yes, I think all my friends and relatives should read this.’”

Satrapi, who was 10 when the revolution happened, says her work is all about battling stereotypes.

“I wanted to put things into historical perspective, to say, hey, we’re still the same,” she said. “The Iranian people have been judged by this regime, but it was a dictatorship. A dictatorship means that the people did not choose it.”

She is used to looking at things from a distance.

The daughter of Marxist intellectuals and descendant of the Qajar dynasty, which ruled Iran until 1925, she was sent away to school in Austria at the age of 14. She returned to Iran to study illustration but has been living in France since 1994.

A precocious child, she listened as her parents’ friends swapped tales of torture. She visited her beloved uncle Anouche in jail shortly before he was executed for his Communist views. Yet Satrapi is not bitter about losing her childhood illusions.

“That is the reality of the world. It’s better to find out right away than to believe Father Christmas exists and suddenly, at the age of 20, to discover the world is filled with cynics and evil people,” she said.

Her experiences have left her with a lasting mistrust of organised religion, but they foster a different kind of belief.

“I think everything we say, everything we think, everything we do has a global reach. No thought, no action goes unnoticed. We must stand by what we say,” Satrapi said.

She fell into drawing comic strips after other artists encouraged her to put her story in pictures. She was quickly hooked and now tops the list of independent best-sellers in France, a country where comic strips are considered an art form.

Satrapi is still recovering from a marathon dash to complete the fourth and final volume of “Persepolis”, including two sleepless days and nights hunched over the drawing boards at the slightly dilapidated studio which she shares with five others.

Among her new projects are children’s books, commissions for magazines including The New Yorker and possibly a film script.

While Satrapi is happy to have a platform for her views, she shuns the role of political commentator.

She declines to comment on the supporters of Iran’s main armed opposition group, the People’s Mujahideen, who set fire to themselves in protest at French police raids that detained their leader Maryam Rajavi as a suspected terrorist.—Reuters