RIP Persepolis Creator Marjane Satrapi

Goodbye To A Truly Unique Independent Comics Voice

Yesterday afternoon, the very sad news reached us that Iranian graphic novelist Marjane Satrapi, who has spent much of her recent years in Paris, has just passed away at the age of 56…

Best known for creating the acclaimed graphic novels Persepolis and Persepolis 2, which originally ran in French back in 2000 and were translated into English in 2003 and 2004. Persepolis won the Angoulême Coup de Coeur Award at France’s Angoulême International Comics Festival. Her next graphic novel Chicken With Plums also won the same award at Angoulême International Comics Festival the following year, in 2004.

Persepolis was adapted into an animated film which debuted in 2007  at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival in May of that year and shared a Special Jury Prize with Carlos Reygadas’s Silent Light (Luz silenciosa). Co-written and co-directed by Satrapi and director Vincent Paronnaud, the French-language picture features the voices of Chiara Mastroianni, Catherine Deneuve, Danielle Darrieux and Simon Abkarian. The English language version, starring the voices of Gena Rowlands, Sean Penn and Iggy Pop, was nominated for Best Animated Feature at the 80th Academy Awards in January 2008. Persepolis was a successful film both commercially (with over a million admissions in France alone) as well as critically, winning Best First Film at France’s César Awards 2008.

Satrapi adapted Chicken With Plums as a live action comedy drama again with director Paronnaud in 2011. Over the next few years, she continued as a film-maker making La bande des Jotas (Gang of the Jotas) in 2012, in 2014, she directed the black comedy film The Voices, from a screenplay penned by Michael R. Perry. The film starred Ryan Reynolds, Anna Kendrick and Gemma Arterton and in 2019, Satrapi directed a biopic of two-time Nobel Prize winner Marie Curie, titled Radioactive. The film is an adaptation of a book of the same name. Initially intended to premiere in 2020 it was cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It was later released online. In 2021, Satrapi starred in the French animated short film The Soloists, voicing Ava, one of the three eponymous sisters fighting to express their musical talents in a country with blatantly sexist laws.

In 2024, Satrapi directed another black comedy, Dear Paris (Paradis Paris), which was featured at the Torino Film Festival. It explored several interconnected stories of people’s lives affected by death.

Satrapi lost her long-time partner Swedish actor and producer Mattias Ripa, who died in 2025 at the age of 53 and this had a huge impact on her well-being.

She leaves a huge legacy through her work and her political advocacy, as a critic of Iran’s government and treatment of women over the past decades. Persepolis is a hugely important graphic novel as is its follow-up as it shines a light on the plight of women in the Iranian republic and her passing leaves a huge gap in international graphic novels.

Everyone at Tripwire offers our condolences to her family and friends.