Over the past couple of days, a kerfuffle’s been unfolding in the Chicago Public Schools after the administration announced that Marjane Satrapi’s graphic novel memoir Persepolis would be removed from seventh-grade classrooms, due to concerns about the language and content, apparently in particular, the book’s portrayal of torture during the Iranian Revolution. It’s not clear to me that a specific parent complaint prompted the book’s being pulled from the curriculum, but it’s still a disappointing decision, given how wonderfully attuned Persepolis is to the inner lives of children and teenagers, particularly teenage girls. And as the decision’s become a political football between the school administration and the Chicago Teacher’s Union, it’s also become a test case in how to handle changes to curriculum poorly, in a way that shows a lack of respect both for students and for strong material itself.

Barbara Byrd-Bennett, the chief executive officer of the Chicago Public School system wrote in a letter to principals in her system that: “We have determined Persepolis may be appropriate for junior and senior students and those in Advance Placement classes. Due to the powerful images of torture in the book, I have asked our Office of Teaching & Learning to develop professional development guidelines, so that teachers can be trained to present this strong, but important content. We are also considering whether the book should be included, after appropriate teacher training, in the curriculum of eighth through tenth grades. Once this curricular determination has been made, we will notify you.” It’s unclear why the school system couldn’t have made this determination over the summer, rather than in the middle of the year, so that the decision would be consistent over a year of students in the system.

I don’t necessarily think it’s the worst thing in the world to determine that a work can be more fully absorbed by students who are both older, and who have been better-prepared for certain material by other parts of the curriculum, whether it’s history, geography, or other literature. But that determination should be made based on those concerns, and announced in a way that is reflective of a concern about the overall efficacy of curriculum design. Pulling the book from the rotation mid-year can’t help but look like the decision is in response to a parent complaint, rather than a genuine reassessment of how best to present a work that the school system continues to think is important and is committed to presenting in a way that will be to the book’s best advantage as well as to its students’. This seems like it would have been particularly important given that, as the Chicago Teacher’s Union points out, many elementary schools in the system don’t have libraries, so removing Persepolis from the classroom is effectively removing student access to the book, at least in a school setting.

It’s also easy in cases like these to appear that you’re showing a lack of respect for what students can handle. The portrayals of torture in Persepolis aren’t exceptionally graphic. They are, like everything else in the book, in black and white, in fairly simple outlines. Gashes from a beating don’t suppurate—they stand out in sharp relief. The way the pain of them is communicated is through the main character’s reaction. The experience of reading Persepolis as a child or teenager is the experience of seeing the impact of torture on someone very like yourself, who likes punk music, and gets angry at God, and alternately adores and fights with her parents. It’s a book that trusts teenagers to handle the idea of torture and the concept of war because its author had to handle those things not just in practice, but in reality, when her relatives were tortured and her friends’ older siblings were sent off to die in war with keys to paradise around their necks. Believing that children shouldn’t experience those things for real shouldn’t be the same thing as believing that they can’t being trusted to experience the sadness, fear, and anger that will help them navigate the world as moral adults. A school system that’s afraid of its ability to handle introducing students to these kind of emotions or ideas is one that doesn’t seem to trust its teachers or itself very much.

I recently had a chance to attend a screening of Chicken With Plums, Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud’s adaptation of her graphic novel of the same name about a violinist, Nasser-Ali Khan (Mathieu Amalric), who makes the decision to give up on life. The movie itself is a wild ride through pre-revolutionary Iran, legendary Persia and the United States in a mix of live action and animation. And Satrapi’s talk after the screening was almost as wide-ranging, touching on her cinematic influences, getting audiences to relate to Iranian characters, and the value of reading her work for its politics, as well as her glimpses into the human heart.

Satrapi called back to an older tradition in discussing the multi-cultural nature of her movies, in which French actress Chiara Mastroianni has been a stand-in for Iranian Satrapi. “Cultures, they have so much influence on each other. You don’t get to the border and one culture stops and another begins. They are rings of the same tree,” she said. “You have an Iranian story, you shoot it in Berlin, it’s in French, and you present it in America…You had a man like [Ernst] Lubitsch, he made a set, called it Prague, and had Jimmy Stewart or Gary Cooper and they were Czech.” And she noted that while she and Paronnaud love European movies, “We also love American sitcoms because they were all over the world. Who’s The Boss was the impetus for us to make the sitcom section,” of Chicken With Plums, which follows Nasser’s son on a his picaresque immigration to the United States.

Satrapi said that one of the challenges in making Chicken With Plums was how quickly expectations for what she, as a graphic novelist, would do in movies became set. “Once you have made an animation movie that works, they want you to make another animated movie with the same subject,” she said. But she said that the tradition of underground art, where she and Paronnaud began their careers, gave them and their collaborators the advantage of low expectations. They, and the composer who wrote the original score for Chicken With Plums were less worried about making money than about making the work that was important to them.

It was an attitude that also served her well in making Persepolis. Satrapi said she’d been reluctant to pursue an adaptation because of their shaky track record, until a friend told her, she said, “Are you crazy? People are going to give you a couple million Euro…The worst thing that can happen is you make the worst movie in the world.” Even then, she was rigorous about what she wanted, reasoning that she wouldn’t make the movie if her conditions, including hand-drawn animation and casting Catherine Deneuve to voice her mother, weren’t met. Satrapi said it was important to her to make that movie with hand-drawn animation because “The abstraction of the drawing is something that let us tell a unique story, because anyone can relate,” but that because Chicken With Plums is a sweeping romance rather than a historically-engaged memoir, “This was a universal love story, so we didn’t need that.”

The movie traces the source of Nasser’s dissatisfaction back to the love of his youth, with a young woman named Irâne whose father refused to allow her to marry a musician without prospects. That journey back in time makes clear that Nasser’s brokenness is not simply a character trait, but the result of a profound disappointment that damaged his ability to connect with other people. To be nasty and bad cannot only be the privilege of nasty and bad people. Everyone has the right to be nasty and bad once in a while. His wife Faringuisse (Maria de Medeiros), “she’s like a maniac at the beginning but little by little, we see hear beauty and learn her cause and we come to love her,” Satrapi said.

And while Chicken With Plums is a story of doomed romances, Satrapi made it clear that she welcomes a political reading of Irâne, whose name stands in for her country, and whose rejection of Nasser inspires him to travel the world as a musician, bringing bits of his nation with him in a parallel of the diaspora that sent Iranians, including Satrapi, all over the world. “The story happens in 50 years. There was a coup d’etat that destroyed the dream of democracy, not just in Iran, but in the whole region, and the result is the situation you are living now,” she said. “It’s symbolic but it is something that is underneath. If you understand it, better. If not, it is a beautiful love story.”

I’ve eased up on the book club because I think it’s hard for a critical mass of folks to keep up—we all have a lot on our pop culture agendas. But some people have been asking me what I’m reading or what I’m looking forward to this summer. So here are five books that are either coming out, or are relatively new releases that I think are worth making time for if you’re escaping to the beach somewhere.

-Alif the Unseen, G. Willow Wilson, Out on July 3: Alif The Unseen may not be the first major fictional take on the Arab Spring, but it’s definitely the first to examine what would happen to a censorious oil state if a talented young hacker of Indian-Arab origin, after having his heart shattered by the upper-class girl he’s in love with, goes on the run with his veiled neighbor and best real-life friend and a djinn. It’s a terrifically fun novel about the connections between literature and coding, magic and Islam, and the identities we create for ourselves.

-Shadow and Bone, Leigh Bardugo, Out on June 5: For all my YA readers of all ages in the house, Bardugo’s fantasy set in a Russia where the tsar’s advised by both a Rasputin-like holy man and a powerful wizard is the first part of a trilogy, and by the end of Shadow and Bone, you’ll be glad that’s the case. Fictional authoritarians don’t always pack the punch or capture the rot of unstable regimes, but Bardugo’s does. Plus magic and smooching and some super-scary demons.

-Bring Up the Bodies, Hilary Mantel, Out on May 8: Wolf Hall, the first book in Mantel’s trilogy about Thomas Cromwell, is one of my favorite books of recent years, a rich, strange volume that actually captures what it feels like to be inside a non-modern mindset. I’m excited for the HBO adaptation, if it ever comes to fruition. But I’m even more excited for this sequel.

-The Orphan Master’s Son, Adam Johnson: Johnson’s novel of life in North Korea has been out for a while, and at first blush, it might not seem like beach reading. But it’s gorgeously written, and a propulsive adventure, a reminder that life as we know it can be so strange as to approach magical realism. If you want a reckoning with American inability to comprehend the world beyond ourselves, this is one of the most innovative ways to have that conversation with yourself and a piece of literature.

-Are You My Mother?, Alison Bechdel: I feel like I shouldn’t even have to make the case for this graphic novel memoir, given how wonderful Bechdel’s meditation on her father, Fun Home, is. But for those of you who are unfamiliar, Alison Bechdel is a genius, and Dykes to Watch Out For, her long-running syndicated comic strip about a lesbian community, was fantastic, no matter what your sexual orientation.

I’m sorry to see that Hugo hasn’t earned back its production costs yet: it’s a very good movie that deserves a tremendous audience. But I also want it to succeed not just because it deserves to, but because it strikes me as a promising reinterpretation of an entry in a promising genre.

I read The Invention of Hugo Cabret, the book on which the movie was based, over the break, and two things about it struck me. First, the interpolation of words and pictures — it’s not a straight graphic novel, there aren’t speech bubbles — is a great way to enrich and flesh out a narrative that might be more viable as a short story than as a full novel. In a way, it fills in the interpretive space between prose writer and reader. The illustrations show us what Hugo looks like rather than letting us imagine it for ourselves, providing us with bone structure, with a visual guide through the train station and the streets of Paris. By putting Selznick’s illustrations next to photographs of old movie productions, the book gives them an authority, a sense of authenticity.

Second, I’d like to see more movies that have the kind of relationship to their source material that Hugo has to The Invention of Hugo Cabret. Part of Watchmen‘s airlessness came from the fact that it’s a shot-by-shot remake of the graphic novel. But Hugo takes the shots from the illustrations that work and fill in those that don’t, or that don’t exist at all, adding new whimsy and a sense of scale and grandeur. It’s a good template without being a suffocating one.

We’ve talked a lot about mental illness and Homeland here, and as a corollary (and possible pick-me-up), I wanted to recommend Paul Tobin and Colleen Coover‘s Gingerbread Girl.

The short graphic novel follows Annah Billups, a 26 year old who insists that she has a missing sister. And not just any sister: her Penfield homunculus, which she says her father removed from her brain during her parents divorce, grew into a full-sized sister for her, and who subsequently appeared, only to seem to be avoiding Annah in the city where she lives and loves. As a result of that surgery and loss, Annah claims to feel things less, both physically and emotionally, an excuse for her to behave less than admirably. She schedules two dates for a single night and goes out with the woman who shows up first, is sexually manipulative, and often generally inconsiderate. But she’s still charming and compelling: damage is not incompatible with charisma, and in fact, the two can go together quite handily.

So is Annah insane? It’s never clarified: a Penfield homunculus is, of course, a way of illustrating brain functions rather than a real thing. But the story of her missing sister Annah has a certain magical quality to it that’s a lovely representation of the divorce from self. Annah wants to feel normal and whole again, but Ginger doesn’t want to see her, she dashes around corners and runs out of stores. And while Homeland gives us a Cassandra rendered explicable and admirable to us even as she’s stigmatized by the people around her on-screen, Gingerbread Girl is told significantly from the perspective of the people Annah hurts and loves, from the people (and in several cases animals) she encounters along the way, who are more inclined to be charitable with her than we might be.

It’s also a good way of illustrating the challenges of treatment. It’s one thing to massively reset your brain with ECT therapy. It’s another to have a problem that’s magical rather than scientific. We’re making advances in brain science, but we’re still not far enough along for true cures to depression and dementia, as in Rise of the Planet of the Apes to seem like the provenance of fantasy or science fiction.

I’m really liking The Adventures of Athena Wheatley, Or, Warp & Weft, a new graphic novel that’s publishing an installment every Wednesday. The story isn’t very far along yet, but I just appreciate the basic premise: a black woman, who from the autonomy she seems to have I assume is free, in Baltimore in 1841 becomes a time traveler. It’s a lot of fun to see that extremely familiar premise (time-travel) from a new perspective, whether Athena’s wondering in her journal if she’s becoming a prophetess because of her strange dreams, or skipping a rock through a force field to see if it’s safe to escape through, only to see it transformed to something else entirely. One of the easiest ways to refresh an old concept or scenario is to show how someone with a different set of background assumptions and experiences would react to it rather than trying to convince an audience that a tweak to the scenario itself is radically new and inventive.

I’m reading my way through Powers right now (I’ve finished “Who Killed Retro Girl?” and “Roleplay”). And it strikes me that Deena Pilgrim is a pretty good cure for and critique of the stereotypical female action heroine who chooses her choice, rejects emotion, and embraces violence.

First, there’s that moment in the “Retro Girl” case when Deena has just been partnered up with Christian, and because she thinks he’s holding out on her, she kicks the holy heck out of him. In a more conventional storyline, her suspicion that her new partner was concealing superpowers would be correct, and proven out by her totally over-the-top attack on him. Instead, she’s not only wrong, she’s tried this tactic and been wrong before. “When I was in college I was dating a guy I was pretty sure had powers. I couldn’t prove it, but I was so-so sure. I mean, I asked him,” she explains. “But you know guys, deny, deny, deny! Alright so, my girlfriend told me that she was dating this guy who had powers—and totally denied it—and so she sucker-punched him and totally caught him lying. So, I tried it on my boyfriend, and, well…I punched him in the solar plexus and I broke my pinky against him.” I like that she’s kind of a jerk, and that she’s aware that she’s a bit of a jerk, but that she can’t help herself from being a jerk and she’s aware of that, too.

Later, when she’s offended Christian terribly, she tries to talk him into taking her back as a partner. “You don’t want me around. I guess I gotta respect that, but—I mean, come on,” she wheedles. “How could you not want me around? I’m totally fascinating. And shit. I wear these little belly shirts all day. That’s gotta do something for you.” I was glad to have her acknowledge that, because up until that point, her outfit was bothering me a lot, and I admit when I saw in the supplemental materials that original sketches had her much more professionally dressed, I was feeling disappointed with Brian Michael Bendis and Mike Avon Oeming. But the fact that she had that line, it makes her outfits a choice bourne out of her own internal logic rather than an act of sexist incongruity imposed on her by her creators that she’s unaware is jarring. It’s not a choice that I would have made in the same position and job, but that makes her more of a person to me. The character is written to force me to deal with her on her terms. And those terms are a powerful combination of tricky but not absurd and self-aware.

Also, now that I’ve read a bit of her storyline, I’m excited to see what Lucy Punch does with the role. Punch normally plays roles where she’s slightly ridiculous, the butt of a joke, and she’s good at embodying some off-putting tendencies. I’ll be glad to see her get an opportunity to fill in the other half of the equation.

I am not particularly predisposed to like Frank Miller’s upcoming terrorism-fightin’ comic Holy Terror, but I read through the first couple of pages Newsarama has up. And apparently, Watchmen’s Rorshach is back and narrating, because man does this start with lengthy rooftop rants about how terrible Empire City is, apparently because it’s wet, and other things. I’m not really sure what the purpose of this framing is. If you want to make an argument that terrorists are wrong to see our society as decadent and corrupt, it might make sense to present a more compelling and coherent version of that case and then debunk it. If we’re supposed to take these complaints seriously, and think about the idea that Empire City is complacent and thinks too highly of itself, and maybe had an attack coming, that perhaps might need to be clearer.

Similarly, there’s a really interesting (if uncomfortable and not for everybody) story to be told about the September 11 hijackers and their lives before their terrible, historical crime. What did it mean to them to spend their final days drinking at bars and failing to tip strippers? What did an extended stay in America make them feel about the country they were trying to destroy? Did anyone waver? And if so, how they keep the group together? We’ll never have definitive answers to those questions, but I think they’re reasonable ones for speculative fiction to explore. I don’t really expect the rest of Holy Terror to do this, or do it in a nuanced way, but there are hints of those questions, so I’ll probably read the whole thing. I just can’t help myself sometimes.

I just finished reading Robert Venditti and Mike Huddleston’s The Homeland Directive, which chronicles a dark plot that originates in the Department of Homeland Security and the employees of other agencies who come together to fight it. Without saying too much, The Homeland Directive feels like an exceptionally good graphic novel for the moment in its nervousness about everything from our obsession with security to our financial system. And it’s got a sophisticated sense of how government works that’s often missing from fiction, science-fiction or otherwise. Robert was kind enough to answer some of my questions about the novel, and what our obsession with homeland security’s done to America.

I spent three years covering federal bureaucracy, so the nerd in me was delighted to see a plot that involves interagency rivalries and a government divided against itself. I’d be curious where that part of the story, often something pop culture misses, came from. Were there specific stories that inspired you? Research that you did?

It was an aesthetic choice. For me, a government conspiracy story wouldn’t be believable without opposing factions. As much as government is maligned in the news and in popular entertainment, it’s still comprised of people. And I’m one of those pie-eyed optimists who believe that people, for the most part, are good. If there really were a conspiracy as vast and deadly as the one portrayed in The Homeland Directive, then surely there would be those within government who would seek to derail it. At least I like to think so.

I was also interested in the tension within the administration itself, with a fairly weak president and a Homeland Security secretary carried over from a previous administration who is working not just to undermine him but to engineer cataclysm. Is that a reflection on Robert Gates, who Obama kept on as Defense secretary from the Bush administration? On the risk of a highly empowered Homeland Security Department in general?

Because of where we are in history, the natural reaction is to assume the President in the story is Obama, but the entire book was written before Obama was ever a serious candidate for the Oval Office. That isn’t to say the President in the story is George W. Bush, either. From the beginning, I didn’t want the perception to be that the book was rooted in any one administration, and Mike Huddleston’s idea to keep the President’s face always in shadow was a great way of visually communicating that.

I also decided early on that I didn’t want the book’s conspiracy to reach all the way up to the Presidency, because I felt that would be interpreted as too much of an indictment of government as a whole. Making Secretary Keene, fictional head of the story’s Department of Homeland Security, a holdover from the prior administration added an extra level of separation between himself and his boss. At first, I was a little worried this story element — the President retaining a high-level Cabinet appointment from another administration — would seem impractical. But then Obama chose to keep Robert Gates onboard, and I wasn’t so worried about it anymore.

My hope is that the reader would see Secretary Keene as a sympathetic villain. He truly believes in his heart that what he’s doing is right, and he takes no joy in it. He merely recognizes the contradictory nature of the American population. We ask our government to protect us absolutely from the terrorist threat, but if they try to do so in a way we feel is intrusive, we rebel against it. If we were to be attacked again, though, the first thing we would do is look for someone in government to blame. We’re also contradictory in the sense that the very same freedoms we fight for in the face of government encroachment, we often trade voluntarily for the sake of convenience. These are the paradoxes Secretary Keene finds himself coming up against. I’m not assessing blame or holding myself up as any less contradictory than the next guy. I’m merely suggesting we can’t always have it both ways.
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