In her graphic novel, Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi uses panels (each individual picture) combined with captions to develop further insight into her character's feelings and emotional life. This method provides deep, personal reactions of what it was like emotionally to live through the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran. For example, in the chapter "The Party", she uses a repeated image of people to depict a crowd. On one hand, this is chilling—as with the massacred people—and on the other hand, it expresses joy and relief—such as when the Shah leaves the country and the people celebrate. Just as repetition can be used in text to provide emphasis, Satrapi uses repetition of images in panels to place emphasis on certain plots or storylines that strongly affect her personally.

In general, when Satrapi is focusing on moving the plot forward, pages tend to have more panels, gutters, and longer captions or speech bubbles. When she is focusing on explaining the inner feelings of her character, panels are larger and take up half a page, or a whole page, and illustrate the emotion and internal struggle that Marjane is experiencing. For example, in the chapter "The Sheep", there is a panel that takes up an entire page and is completely black with a small image of the character of child Marjane floating in this darkness. The graphic weight of the darkness of this page adds to the sense of confusion and disorientation that Marjane feels in the moment, directly after her uncle died.

In such ways, Satrapi makes use of the illustrations in the panels and their size to emphasize the emotional ups and downs of her character.