Subversive style: resisting the mullahs with nail polish, rock music, and great novels.

• Author: Freund, Charles Paul
• Position: Book Review

A TEENAGER'S REBELLIOUS night on the town, if the town was Tehran in its early days under the mullahs, meant a trip to Kansas. That was a burger joint on Jordan Avenue, a place where the city's upscale sons and daughters set the tone and controlled the culture. Kansas was a redoubt of available coolness, a place where you could hang out, slouch west, and of course risk arrest.

Kansas and its burgers have achieved a certain degree of world fame now, along with other small-scale, daily-life efforts by Tehran's teens to squirm beyond the control of the regime's vice police. That renown comes thanks to the work of Persian-born artist Marjane Satrapi. In her autobiographical graphic novel Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood (Pantheon), Satrapi raises the question of why the repressive regime let a place like Kansas remain open. Was it to give some kids a place to let off steam? She thinks not. "They probably hadn't the slightest idea what 'Kansas' was," she writes.

Persepolis is in many ways the perfect act of revenge by Satrapi against the Islamism that distorted her childhood, and not merely because she is now free to portray Iran's regime in all its righteous sadism. Satrapi, who now lives and works in France, obviously tells her tales in pictures, violating Islam's anti-iconic strictures. (Actually, Persian Muslims historically ignored those strictures and created impressive art miniatures.) She even portrays God visually, assigning him attributes, which is heretical even without pictures. Indeed, she goes so far as to recount her own childish hopes of attaining prophethood, a thoroughly un-Islamic ambition.

The 33-year-old Satrapi surely must take satisfaction in such revenge, if for no other reason than the manner in which the regime allowed her to "study" art. Female models in her class were forced to pose in chadors that kept them completely hidden. When the students requested a male model--fully dressed, of course--so they could at least see and draw clothed human limbs, a vice cop instructed the students not to look at the model. Maybe Satrapi learned to draw by inference: She has drawn the regime itself, at least as it is revealed in the contorted lives that her characters are forced to endure. Her use of an intentionally naive visual style to tell a story often filled with fear and death only intensifies the power of her tale.

That story is not only about the power of mullahs, of course; it is about the Iran-Iraq war, the difficult...