Pride of Baghdad by Brian K. Vaughn
Pride of Baghdad is a graphic novel (okay, comic book) about a group of lions that escape from a Baghdad zoo during the US invasion in 2003. I’m not sure why I just heard about it now, and why it was on the Borders New Releases shelf last week if it came out in late 2006, but I saw the name of the author and had to pick it up.
Brian K. Vaughn is the writer of the Y: The Last Man series I’ve talked about, as well as one of the writers on everybody’s favorite TV show, Lost. So I’m pretty much going to try and read anything he puts out.
This is a stand-alone story, and, for the most part, the pictures kind of tell the story. (So is it a picture book?) The dialogue is strong but if there was one negative thing I had to look for in Brian K. Vaughn’s writing it would be that he doesn’t really take anything seriously and always kinds of jokes in the wrong place.
However, he handles death scenes very well. In an earlier issue of Y: The Last Man, the crew finds themselves having to live with a group of escaped (female, of course) prison inmates. Well, the main character falls in love with one of them, only to have it end in tragedy as his sister shows up and shoots the girl. As she lay dying she tries to tell him “something I saw on TV once, about lions…” She says, “lions…. ” and you’re thinking, as you turn the page, she’ll say something about lions falling in love or finding each other or some other kind of sweet piece of dying-dialog, only to see that she died never finishing her thought. What was she going to say?! Scenes like that really make the death have more impact, because people die all the time never really finishing what they started, or never really getting to say goodbye. More on this in a minute.
I tried to think hard about this story and what it meant. I mean, anything having to do with talking lions in Baghdad has to have some kind of message behind it. As far as I can tell, it has to do with the nature of freedom and what it means to be “liberated.” These lions were set free after a bomb blew apart their cage at the zoo, so they set off, not really knowing what they were getting in to. They searched for food, but having too much compassion for the “keepers” (humans), refused to eat them. These animals weren’t necessarily meant to be free, being raised in captivity most of their lives, so, I think the message is… what does that mean for the war in Iraq? If freedom has to be earned, are we just setting up the Iraqi’s for disaster by “giving” it to them?
I don’t have an answer. But the way the animals view the war and human civilization (they have no idea what anything is or what it means) is amusing. A wise turtle tells them, in passing, that they’re fighting over black water, and the way they talk about it makes you think “is that really it? We’re stupid.”
The death scene comes in the end and (well, I guess I should put a spoiler warning here… so)… Read the rest of this entry »
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