It is perhaps Ardeshir's finest achievement. The series differs markedly from the artist's other drawings, which are mostly caricatures, populated by grotesque and whimsical imaginary creatures, insects, and scorpions, and, on occasion, by figures from Iranian political life. In Iran have a grandeur of scale, a sobriety of tone, and a realism which mark the series as an undertaking of a higher and more serious order. The drawings have few, if any, counterparts in the world of political cartoons. The latter is a highly conventionalized idiom employing a limited vocabulary of symbols and capable of little subtlety.
Cartoons tend to be historically specific, firmly situated in their particular time and place.
Ardeshir, for the most part, rejects the symbols and conventions of the idiom. The drawings in Life in Iran, moreover, avoid topicality and possess even an intentional ambiguity. While the atrocities which inspired these drawings were indeed real, they are never portrayed with any specificity. In Life in Iran, the Pahlavi regime and its officers are masked in the clothing and trappings of the Qajar period. In the long tradition of artistic political commentary, the closest analogy to Ardeshir's work is that of the Enlightenment-era Spanish artist Francisco Goya y Lucientes.