By Alex Boney

2006 has been a banner year for writer Brian K. Vaughan. After Vaughan cleaned up at the Eisner Awards in 2005 (including “Best New Series” for Ex Machina and the more general “Best Writer” for the year), he hasn’t rested on his laurels. He has continued writing the ongoing books that initially distinguished him in comics (Y: The Last Man and Ex Machina), but he’s taken on projects beyond DC that have garnered critical attention from numerous news and entertainment publications. Entertainment Weekly recently called attention to Vaughan’s new Dr. Strange miniseries from Marvel, and his The Escapists miniseries from Dark Horse will probably catch the attention of the Eisner committee again this year. But Pride of Baghdad, a graphic novel illustrated by Niko Henrichon and published by Vertigo, is the book that is most likely to solidify Vaughan’s reputation this year. Curiously, Pride of Baghdad is also a book that’s likely to leave readers scratching their heads and wondering what they just read.

Pride of Baghdad is based on the true story of four lions that escaped the Baghdad Zoo during the U.S. bombing of Baghdad in April 2003. During Operation: Iraqi Freedom, several lions made their way through the streets of the ravaged city before they were eventually gunned down by U.S. soldiers. The story makes for an odd, unique footnote to an intense, violent conflict, but it doesn’t seem to offer a premise that could sustain an extended narrative. Complex, well-written war fiction is rare, even when it is anchored by the perspectives of soldiers involved in combat. Tim O’Brien’s Vietnam fiction is more the exception than the rule. But Vaughan’s writing is nothing if not clever, and he gets around the difficulty of writing war fiction by not writing about war. Tanks, planes, and artillery are certainly present, but this is not a story about humans who wield the machinery of war. Instead, Vaughan anthropomorphizes the animals of the city (both in and out of the zoo) and tells a story of conflict and survival from their perspectives.

The main characters in Pride of Baghdad are the four lions—Zill, Noor, Ali, and Safi—who comprise the “pride” of the title. The animals talk to each other and have distinct characteristics and personalities. The lions also have an inter-“personal” history within their group that provides dramatic tension in dialogue and action. Zill, the alpha male of the pride, used to take Safi as his mate, but he now prefers the younger, more vital Noor. Ali, Noor’s young cub, provides a naïve, innocent perspective that offsets the adult themes that predominate the book. Vaughan’s narrative approach is audacious. Good animal stories are as hard to come by as good war stories. Any modern anthropomorphic tale runs the risk of being dismissed as either a pretentious, neo-Zen Aesop clone or a vacuous, sterile Disney cartoon. Thankfully, like Art Spiegelman’s Maus before it, Pride of Baghdad manages to avoid the pitfalls of both. The animals in this story don’t speak in stilted, artificial-foreign dialect or broken English. Their speech is natural and ordinary, which sets the story apart from most animal fables. In a nice metatextual moment early in the story, Vaughan does acknowledge the influence (or at least the unavoidable presence) of Aesop. When Safa tries to convince an antelope to help the animals escape the zoo, the antelope responds, “You’ve heard the one about the scorpion and the frog, right?” But aside from a discussion Noor has with a turtle later in the book, the story generally veers away from the clear, simplistic moralizing that defines both traditional fables and Disney stories.

In fact, one of the things that’s simultaneously maddening and rewarding about Vaughan’s writing is its almost insistent ambiguity. This is especially evident in Ex Machina and Y: The Last Man, but it’s also what guides a good part of Pride of Baghdad. While the lions are clearly the protagonists and their fate at the end of the novel is wrenching, there are no clear lessons to be learned from the story—or at least no clear lessons that can be applied to the war and the present situation in Iraq. Vaughan distills the emotions—fear, hope, exhilaration—that come from long-sought, new-found freedom. The feelings of the lions as they leave the rubble of the zoo potentially mirror the feelings of a human populace freed from the repression of a tyrannical dictator. But the virtues the lions cling to as they make their way through the city—courage, pride, dignity, and honor—come to a roaring halt when they encounter a force that doesn’t recognize or value such virtues.

The futility and moral ambivalence at the conclusion of Pride of Baghdad seem to undercut the significance of the lions’ journey. Their quest is not necessarily meaningless, but it does invoke a sense of frustration and helplessness. The lions are cut down by a senseless and violent brutality that crushes even the most courageous and honorable. But perhaps this, too, is one of the true stories of war—both from the perspective of civilians and from the perspective of soldiers. And it’s not a new or unfamiliar lesson. Homer taught it in The Iliad over 2,700 years ago. More recently, the British poet Wilfred Owen revised a measure of Homer’s ambivalence for the modern warfare of World War I:

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
            Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
            And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
            His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
            If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
            Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
            Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
            Of vile, incurable sores on the innocent tongues,—
            My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
            To children ardent for some desperate glory,
            The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
            Pro patria mori. (“Dulce Et Decorum Est” 17-28)