Comic strip: The Ayatollah's Son

"I got a star for having long hair."

This comic strip appeared in a social justice comic anthology published in 2009 called Ctrl.Alt.Shift Unmasks Corruption, edited by Paul Gravett.

I wrote it with a very dear Iranian friend of mine. He wants to remain anonymous and I think that’s wise. Given the current situation in Iran, I thought it would be of interest today. There’s a lot of news about Iran just now and not all of it is true, but I can assure you this story and its characters – although presented as fiction – are based closely on reality. I spent three months in Iran soon after the millennium and I found it a fascinating country and met many wonderful people who I still cherish in my heart.

Our social conditioning is such that we’re not  usually interested in heroes from other countries. Even the brilliant Persepolis originated in France. You’d never get a British publisher commissioning it, only reprinting it. So there was no real chance of Stars going further, but I had to do it. 

There are so many fake heroes in comics that I hate (see my Secret History posts on Marshal Law), it was refreshing to write, for once, about true heroes. And Lee O’Connor has done a wonderful job in bringing the characters to life. 

I think the one thing many Iranians would dread would be being ‘rescued’ by the United States and Britain, given our country’s recent track record in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya. And given Iran’s history, where Britain and America’s conduct was even more dire than usual. 

With my Iranian friend, I would watch the pirate satellite TV broadcasts of Frood Fouladvand, one of Iran’s  modern heroes. In broad terms, politically he presented a midway point between the Islamic regime and the West, where Iranians alone – without foreign interference – would decide their own destiny. My friend would translate his witty, live telephone conversations with troll callers who often threatened his life. ‘Who sent you?’ he’d snap. ‘Margaret Thatcher? Tony Blair?’ Like other Iranians, he had a low opinion of British politicians.

And I saw how Britain reacted to him. The Guardian presented him as a terrorist, because he was a resistance leader against the Islamic regime. He was arrested in Britain for inciting rebellion during the Iran elections. They got him under the British terrorism act. There was a full account on Wikipedia. Then he was mysteriously reduced to a stub entry. Now there’s a full account on Wikipedia once again, because he’s almost certainly dead, so he’s no longer a threat to British interests.

Fouladvand was lured back to Iran and disappeared into Evin prison, which is a death sentence.

But he also incited various acts of passive resistance in the West – some of which were quite spectacular (protests on board a plane and at the Louvre) but none was reported by the British press. Because that wouldn’t suit our interests.

A remarkable thing about him was he was an actor and his dubbed voice was used on cowboy  films in Iran in the Sha's time.

So Fouladvand was the voice of John Wayne and Gary Cooper!

I did my best to do him justice and dramatise his story in my 2000AD comic strip Greysuit, but it's still fiction, although I state who Fouladvand is in the intro to the book version.

I wish there was more I could write that would be useful. 

All I can hope is that Britain keeps its snout out of Iran in future. And its hands  off Iranian oil this time around. It’s already done enough harm to that beautiful country and its people.

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Apologies for the low res on these images, it’s the only copy I have.