Satrapi has said reading Maus is what showed her that comics could carry this, and that she decided to tell her own story after it. The inheritance is specific: black and white with no tonal shading, a child's eye on a catastrophe, and a frame in which the author as an adult is questioning the past rather than reporting it. Spiegelman drew the Shoah through a son interviewing his father; Satrapi drew the Iranian revolution through a girl and her grandmother.