Pride of Baghdad

Pride of Baghdad is now the book I will give people when they're skeptical about comic books. That's pretty high praise, but I can't imagine a book more deserving of it.

It'll take some convincing to get nonbelievers to pick it up, of course. It's a comic book, and that's a big enough hurdle as it is. But even if you sell people on that, they might get to the first page and dismiss this as Disney-style trash, because, yes, it features talking animals. But this is not for kids, and it's not to be missed.

Brian K. Vaughan is easily my favorite comic book writer working today. He writes Y: the Last Man, Ex Machina, created Marvel's The Runaways, and also works for the folks at TV's Lost. Somehow despite all those commitments, he found time to write an original graphic novel. Inspired by the real life story of a group of lions who escaped after they were abandoned by zookeepers during Iraq War bombing, Vaughan crafts a deeply political story without being at all one-sided. Rather than a simple "the war is good" or "the war is bad," he presents four points of view, each given pretty equal time, and none declared right or wrong. But it sure makes you think.

I'm not the least bit familiar with Niko Henrichon's work before Pride of Baghdad, but his art here is fantastic. The lions appear remarkably human. Some of the credit for this goes to Vaughan, for his characterization, but Henrichon manages to convey the lions' emotions through facial expressions without the it looking at all silly. They still look like lions, but they also look scared, or happy, or whatever. That's pretty impressive. But even beyond that, every page is just plain beautiful.

The book is intelligent and accessible, funny and heartbreaking. I just read it yesterday, but I want to read it again.