Review by Win Wiacek
Iranian ex-pat Dara Naraghi creates his own comics when not adapting licensed properties. In conjunction with Brent Bowman he conceived a trilogy of graphic novels cunningly blending real-world reportage with fantastic fantasy in a mythic manner both intriguing and captivating. Initial outing Persia Blues: Leaving Home won the 2014 Small Press & Alternative Comics Expo prize for Best Graphic Novel.
That introduced spirited young woman Minoo Shirazi who had a history of troublemaking and parental issues in two very different worlds dubbed for discomfort “There” and “Here”. Far away and long ago a bold warrior woman with an inexplicable incendiary power in her hands battled beside her lover Tyler against brigands and worse to retrieve a holy book in the heyday of the Persian Empire. We’ll call that “Here”.
Over “There” in our world, a forthright, independent Iranian architecture student named Minoo was seen at various moments of her life, constantly challenging the authority of her father and the far more dangerous agents of the theocracy.
This is a tale of interconnected contrasts, with the modern scenes – deliberately convoluted by mixing the chronological sequence of flashback events – rendered in stark black line whilst the exotic and thrilling Persian adventure is presented as lush, painterly pencil greytones.
Moreover, although the general dialogue and idiom of the ancients is what you’d expect in an historical drama, Tyler and mystic Minoo speak like American 20-somethings, eventually admitting to Purandokht they are from somewhere called “Columbus”.
By the end, catastrophes have occurred in past and present in a story fraught with parental issues and much unsaid. As before, glimpses of a greater truth come from a brace of epilogues. The first sees Minoo in Columbus three months ago. She’s skyping with the dad she still doesn’t trust, but blithely unaware of the trouble he’s in, whilst the second focuses on Persepolis where a distraught daughter is confronted by the all-wise Griffon. He challenges the warrior woman’s understanding of her strangely incomplete existence and asks difficult questions about the father she cannot remember.
Gilded with excerpts of classical poetry by Rumi (13th century Persian poet, jurist, scholar, theologian and Sufi Mystic Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī: very cool and totally worthy of your further attention), this is a smart and subtle melding past and present, fact and fiction. It revels in exploiting reader expectation and confusion whilst crafting a beguiling multi-layered tale of family, responsibility, guilt, oppression and the hunger for independence which carries the reader along, promoting wonder and second-guessing whilst weaving a tantalising tapestry of mystery.
Engaging, rewarding and just plain refreshingly different, Persia Blues was on the verge of becoming a classic for all time, but alas, was never concluded.
