GN: Pride of Baghdad

Aspiring comic book writers take note: If you're looking for mainstream media attention, there's apparently one sure-fire way to get it in spades, which fan-favorite writer and current media darling Brian K. Vaughan so ably demonstrated this month with the release of his "Pride of Baghdad" graphic novel.

 

Got your pencil and paper ready? Okay, it's as easy as this: Make it about the Iraq War. I suppose if it's about the War on Terror in general, you can probably count on some attention (See Art Spiegelman's "In The Shadow of No Towers" or Ernie Colon and Sid Jacobson's odd "The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation"), but as long as the comic explicitly deals with the number one news story dominating the mainstream media's attention, you're pretty much guaranteed a mention.

 

Such is the case with Vaughan's "Pride," lushly illustrated by Niko Henrichon, which was well-positioned to benefit from both of the mainstream media's conflicting impulses regarding comics.

 

On the one hand, certain segments of the non-comics media have begun treating comics with the same respect and attention they do other forms of pop entertainment, like film and TV, particularly good comics, and so it's really no surprise that the Onion's AV Club, Entertainment Weekly or Time's online comics blog have given Vaughan some ink. Other segments still consider comics a child's medium (or, at best, a medium for children and grown-ups that think like children), and thus pick up on a book like "Pride" for thinking outside the box (or the panel, as the case may be) and covering a subject other than superheroes punching supervillains.

 

So in addition to the usual suspects, "Pride of Baghdad" was similarly covered in USA Today, The New York Times, the Detroit Free Press, The Fort Wayne News Sentinel and the Kansas City Star, and sundry other papers, not to mention NPR's "Talk of the Nation."

 

Coupled with all the hype within the comics press itself, that adds up to a pretty well talked about graphic novel. Not quite on par with the tsunami of ink that Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie's recent "Lost Girls" garnered a few weeks previously, but not far off from "Lost Girls" levels, either. [Editor’s Note: And Vaughan didn’t need nudity to do it.]

 

Unlike some of the comics to break the glass wall of mainstream media coverage, however—think Marvel's Joe Quesada hyping "Civil War" on the Colbert Report, or the New York Times and Wired hyping the lesbian Batwoman in "52" or the Hispanic lead in "Blue Beetle"—"Pride of Baghdad" is well worth talking about. Newcomers to comics driven to give the book a look will be able to slide right into it, whereas "Civil War" and "52" are practically impenetrable to new readers.

 

Vaughan picked up on a true story of the Iraq War, of four lions who escaped the Baghdad Zoo near the start of the American invasion in the spring of 2003, and saw the symbolism of the animals receiving unexpected (and un-asked for) freedom in the wake of a bombing. He built a fun, funny, sad and scary story around it.

 

Unlike human characters, animals make for rather easy symbols. If Vaughan used Iraqis or Americans to talk about his apparently conflicted feelings about the Iraq War, it wouldn't have the same impact as using lions (and monkeys, antelopes, horses, birds, turtles and a bear). It would have seemed didactic and tiresomely political.

 

Talking animals are so divorced from reality that they automatically add a welcome level of fantasy, even when the story is as grounded in real events as this one is, and they plug easily into the long, long tradition of analogy through anthropomorphism, stretching back far farther than "Maus" and Uncle Scrooge comics, all the way to the fables of Aesop and the very earliest myths of human history.

 

Vaughan's four lions have four different points of view, another refreshing aspect of the comic (politically, it's a meditation, not a diatribe).

 

Zill, the only adult male, is quite comfortable with the way things are, and is confused and frightened by the new reality. Safa, an older female, still remembers how horrible the lack of order that comes with true freedom can be, and prefers a bad, predictable reality to an uncertain, possibly worse one. Noor, a young female who barely remembers what true freedom is like, yearns for it, but, once she gets it, is unsure if it's really what she wanted. The fourth member is her son Ali, a cub, who is pretty much bewildered by the events of the war, and asks all the innocent naïve questions, allowing for the clearest answers.

 

Vaughan's story works on two separate levels, neither of them preachy. Though I doubt anyone will actually read it entirely on the first level, "Pride of Baghdad" works just fine as a straightforward animal adventure, "Homeward Bound" meets "Three Kings." The amount of violence, gore and sexuality (there's even a rather horrible rape

scene) keep it from fitting into the usual all-ages territory that stories of talking animals usually belong to, but it can be read and enjoyed simply on a character level (Well, right up until the last few pages, in which narration intrudes to deliver a vague but heartbreaking epilogue).

 

The story also works on an allegorical level, with the various lions standing in for various points-of-view on the subject of freedom, and the debate between the advantages and disadvantages of both freedom and oppression (the familiar "at least the trains run on time" argument). An overly serious reader could easily make an argument that the bear stands for Saddam's sons, the zoo keepers for Saddam, the lions for the Iraqi people, and so on, but this isn't an "Animal Farm"-like manifesto, and getting hung up on identifying the symbols renders them somewhat ineffective.

 

Rather than Orwell's "Animal Farm," if one had to compare it to a past literary work, L. Frank Baum's original Wizard of Oz story seems most apt—packed with symbolism, but easily enjoyable even if it all flies over your head (or you simply choose to ignore it).

 

As good as it is, as much attention as it's being paid, "Pride of Baghdad" isn't a career-making work for Vaughan. His work has long been championed from within the comics press and the mainstream press, particularly his "Y: The Last Man" series, which works as both an intensely gripping sci-fi epic and as a deeper exploration of gender, and "Ex Machina," which works as a compelling "West Wing"-style political drama, and as an exploration of post-9/11 zeitgeist gut check. Even his Marvel superhero comic, "Runaways," was something of a break out hit with the mainstream; Entertainment Weekly was talking it up while it was still in its first few issues.

 

It's certainly a high point in Vaughan's career though, and a peak in the relationship between the mainstream and the comics scene. They say there's no such thing as bad publicity and there may be some truth to that. But it's gotta be better to have great publicity, particularly when the subject is deserving of it.