Wake Now in the Fire: A Story of Censorship, Action, Love and Hope. By Jarrett Dapier and AJ Dungo. Ten Speed Press. 2026. 463pp. $39.95.
Review by Paul Buhle
Book Banning is very much in the news these days. We may usefully remember the controversy kicked off by student protests in 2013 when the Chicago school system somewhat mysteriously and without warning, banned Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi’s widely-read, universally admired graphic novel.
Crying in the classroom.
By a fateful tragedy, the passing of Satrapi, in Paris in March of 2026, at age 56, came only a month after the publication of the book in question. We can hope she appreciated the splendid documentation of the Chicago struggle from the student point of view. They made educational history with and through her work.
Marjane Satrapi (1969 — 2026)
The larger significance of Satrapi’s life and work still remains perhaps too recent to be fully absorbed by comics devotees and others around the world. Her life project across several media (she also wrote and directed films) is large, her life is too large, for easy comprehension. The first women comic artist’s work—or feminist comic work— to be read in dozens of languages, made into a much-admired animated film, landed like a political bombshell, if not entirely the kind the artist intended.
Marjane Satrapi repeatedly insisted that a US war against Iran would only worsen the condition of Iranians. The massive, heavily youthful rebellion against the hated Iranian Shah, imposed by the CIA upon Iranians in 1953, also became through Satrapi an artistic outcry against the Ayatollahs seizing power afterward. Western critics, even Western audiences, heard the second message by Satrapi but predictably almost blotted out the first, despite the protests of the artist herself.
Put that aside. As a graphic novel, Persepolis portrayed social struggles realistically, mirroring the work of Joe Sacco among others in tracing the tragedies of the region. More than that, the book touched a new generation, millions of young people discovering this new kind of comic and in large numbers wondering if they, too, might be agents of political and/or artistic creation.
The significance of Satrapi and Persepolis also returned the careful, probably older reader to mull the rise of modern comic art. In Wake Now In the Fire, a complex and stirring narrative of youthful self-revelations through the student activity around Persepolis also recalls comics and Chicago from another angle. Justin Green’s 1970s-80s recollections of Chicago (including a near-suburb, Skokie) arguably reinvented comics or at least a major trope within the Undergrounds. Recalling his painful teenage years and quasi-religious delusions, Green established a narrative tone for the very different personal revelations of Art Spiegelman, Alison Bechdel and Lynda Barry among others, artists recalling their youthful struggles. Today, women’s comics across the world seem especially intent on retracing the autobiographical thread, reinventing it in their own ways.
Crying in the classroom.
And here, curiously enough, is the story-behind-the-story of Wake Now In the Fire. The saga of a Chicago public school is, at first glance, most remarkable for its narrative. Students at a public prep school in 2013 come across Persepolis in class and not surprisingly begin to discuss the book’s contents and meaning. It is, after all, in part about Satrapi’s own youthful rebellion within the larger struggles. A higher-up in the Chicago educational system orders that class lessons on the book cease and copies be removed from school libraries, a foolish act with major consequences. Some copies are even burned.
The school system is rocked by petitions and even a street protest, with student unrest in one form or another continuing for months. NPR and local Chicago news media hop on the story of book-banning, rightly seeing a dangerous warning of worse to come in the future that turns out to be our present. Wake Now faithfully recounts all this, almost entirely through the lives and actions of adolescents themselves, elaborated in granular detail. The classes they attend (sometimes skip), their daily school social life and their lives outside of school—often minority students in a city of prosperous white Chicagoans and cops suspicious of nonwhite youngsters’ actions—are seen sympathetically but also realistically. The dialogue crackles with teenage banter.
The art, at first seemingly scaled-down detail with a reductive wash of blue tints with some red (used mainly for the cover of Persepolis copies), becomes more and more obviously an artist’s sensitive response to the daily lives of the students. They can be said to live blurry lives. Or perhaps (another theory of the reviewer) the saga encompassing a staggering 456pp simply could not yield crosshatching and other such artistic detail that would have taken a small army of artists. In any case and in the face of this reviewer’s initial doubts, it works.
Writer/editor Jarrett Dapier, a figure among school librarians nationally even before the publication of this book and already a creator of children’s books hit with threats of censorship, would appear to have overseen every aspect of Wake Now. He acknowledges the artist as handicraftsman, but more than that. He has evidently worked at close range with AJ Dungo, already an award-winning artist of comics for young people.
The story triumphs as it slides into interpersonal relations of the students, and thence to a particular boy from what my parents’ generation invariably called “a broken home.” Mom had disappeared, and Dad, who himself had staged a personal campaign against the conservative effort of recent years to defund PBS and effectively ban Sesame Street, cannot handle the details of their daily lives. He crashes one day and is hospitalized, leaving the boy dependent upon family friends. Other such stories follow, less dramatic in some ways, more in others, like kids busted by Chicago cops for skate-boarding in public areas. It all seems starkly realistic to me.
Crying in the classroom.
The resulting conversations among teens about the meaning of book banning flow in and out of their other conversations and their actions on behalf of keeping the book in the Chicago school curriculum. It is clear, from early on, that the authorities feel threatened and their instinctive response is to slap down the threats in various ways while resorting only in the last instance to suspensions, expulsions and the usual tracking of troubled kids out of the system. They knew, in real life, that they were being watched.
The interactions of teachers and parents who clearly sympathize but whose lives are overflowing with other demands, offer fascinating psychological angles. These grown-ups are not good or bad. Even if their own personal, pedagogical projects are worthy, they have no time for the trouble. Uncertain, against their own better selves, they would clearly prefer having the students’ collective actions go away, be put aside, deferred for another day.
The students, for their part, have enormous difficulty getting themselves together. A young woman of color, facing a world of difficulties, refuses to give in easily to join a struggle led by a white classmate on his way to an elite college and a life of privilege. How can she trust him when he wants her to take chances with the authorities?
What saves the day is the spirit of student rebellion in a righteous cause of free speech/reading and the ways it allows the various contradictions of young people’s lives to be set aside or dealt with in useful ways.
Students rally around the idea that no book and no one should be censored, Muslim or Jew, black, brown or white. The administrative compromise, that the book will not be taught in seventh- or eighth-grade classes, is itself a victory. That the school administration of Chicago is actually eliminating most school libraries as a purported cost-cutting measure is an indication that even victories are limited.
Perhaps in that spirit, it is worth noting that Satrapi herself answered an appeal from a Chicago student to write a “public statement” (p.148) that “I am ashamed of people who take these kinds of decisions” of censorship. She knew these students, in crucial ways, and they knew her back.
Paul Buhle is an American historian, who is (retired) Senior Lecturer at Brown University, author or editor of 35 volumes, including histories of radicalism in the United States and the Caribbean, studies of popular culture, and a series of nonfiction comic art volumes. He is the authorized biographer of C. L. R. James.
