Pride of Baghdad

Pride of Baghdad is an allegorical talking animal book that starts and ends in reality, with one of the best one sentence plots I’ve ever seen: American bombings in Iraq freed a number of animals from the Baghdad Zoo, including four lions that wandered away into the desert…Pride of Baghdad is the fictional story of those lions, as they wander through their once beautiful, now war-torn country, trying to find peace.

The easy comparison for this book is Animal Farm, since it’s a political allegory with an animal cast.  The allegory in this book isn’t so straightforward, though; when we read Animal Farm in ninth grade, my teacher made us a chart telling us who each animal represented.  One of the only pitfalls of Pride is the danger of overthinking the allegory on your first read, as I did.

Focusing on the book instead of its real world parallels, I found one of the best graphic novels I’ve ever read.  Brian K. Vaughan, the book’s writer, has always had the talent/luck of pairing with perfect artists for his stories. I was a little nervous about Niko Henrichon, the artist of Pride, since I’d only seen his work in a book called Barnum, which was interesting, but I thought not all that original.  Ten pages into Pride, it was apparent that no one else could have drawn it better than Henrichon; the pencils and colors in this book are as unique and original as they are stunningly beautiful. 

There has of course been plenty of debate about the book’s politics.  Given its story, I was expecting Vaughan’s personal views to come through a bit more, but he stayed firmly in the background; Pride is no anti-war polemic.  Instead, it’s a multi-layered allegory that examines Iraq itself, and the nature of freedom, as well as the costs of war, just or not.

Of course, bigger implications aside, the story wouldn’t work if its characters were uninteresting.  But the lions, whose lack of humanity I saw as a potential stumbling block, ended up being one of my favorite things about it.  Almost immediately Vaughan crafts four believable characters in Zill, Ali, Safa, and Noor.  They allow Pride to toy with the conventions of a Disney talking animal movie––this set me up for some really emotional moments throughout the story, as Vaughan jumps his pride in and out of Disney-land.

I can’t recommend this book enough: the whole thing crackles with that synergy that makes comics great, the magic that happens when an artist and a writer work perfectly together, and the product seems to come from one shared mind. 

Vaughan has said that no matter what he does in his career, this is the work he’ll be proudest of––tall words from an acclaimed Eisner winner.  After reading Pride, I totally understand––it’s the first book I’ve read recently that made me jealous as a writer.  Vaughan’s work until this point has all been good, some of it excellent, but this is the first work he’s produced that may prove transcendent; the first work that seems to have been delivered through Vaughan from a higher place that writers rarely tap into, if ever.

I’ve been thinking about Pride since the moment I finished it, and while everyone who reads it seems to come away with something different, the thought that stayed with me was this: Why is it that the story of four fictional lions, as well-written and drawn as they are, moves me and grabs my attention infinitely more than the daily tragedies and triumphs of the members of my own pride, American and otherwise, in Iraq?  I don’t know the answer to it, but I think Vaughan’s done a damn good job raising the question.