Barbelith Underground > Comic Books > Pride of Baghdad - Brian K Vaughn's 'Big Cats in an Urban Jungle' take on the Iraq war. Discussion anyone?

I was hoping any Barbelithers who have read ‘Pride of Baghdad’ written by Brian K Vaughn, might want to discuss it.

The art was what sold me on this book. I rarely buy new graphic novels and practically never buy hardback ones, but I took one quick look at the artwork in this, snapped the book shut and took it to the counter.

And I have no regrets. The book is a beautiful art object. The story is moving and well-told. BUT I'm a little lost as to what the story was about.

SPOILER – WARNING: My reading of the story is below. It does give away the ending, but no more than the fly-leaf of the book itself!

So the animals discuss and live through a comparison between being kept captive with all their basic needs provided for and living free with all the danger and uncertainty and risk of hunger that that entails. This dichotomy would seem to be the philosophical meat of the book.

However this might be a misleading presumption as they don't really make a choice. They more or less have to leave the zoo as they realise that no-one is going to look after them there any longer. (Surely the thing to do would have been to stay at least as long as the donkey-carcase lasted? No-one in the story suggests this option)

The 'freedom' they do experience is highly qualified as they are in an environment where lions wandering around freely are a definite no-no and their days are numbered as soon as they leave the zoo.

The lions only ever have the illusion of freedom anyway as their lives and eventual deaths are completely proscribed by their circumstances. They're tough enough, but no jungle beast can stand up to armour piercing rounds. All of this would seem to negate the idea that this is a study of ‘freedom’ versus ‘captivity’. But if the cats are meant to stand as metaphors for something, what might it be?

I could buy it that Brian K Vaughn realised there was a great story in the news item about lions escaping from Bagdad during 'Operation Enduring Freedom' or whatever it was called, and then he used all his writerly skill to recreate those couple of days when the lions were loose and to bring the creatures themselves back to life as only slightly anthropomorphicised comic book characters; using the creative magic of writing and art to make them live and breathe again, if only between the covers of his book. He certainly succeeds in making each of them different and unique and interesting. There’s no doubt that he’s very good on characterisation and the ending of the book is all the more tragic for this.

But my question is – is there more going on here than this creative ‘resurrection’? My chief problem is that the backdrop of the story is the bombing of Bagdad, which was the precursor of an extremely unpopular military occupation and a concurrent genocidal civil war.

The backdrop would be the chief selling point of the book as far as the plot goes. No reader could read this graphic novel without trying to find parallels between the lions’ struggles and the events in Iraq which have dominated practically every news bulletin since the occupation began. I think the lions would obviously correlate to the Iraqi victims of that war. After all, the book is called ‘Pride of Baghdad’, which has more than one meaning.

So what’s the story saying about the war currently ongoing in Iraq?

Shit happens, basically is the only reading I can take from it! From their time in the wild up to they are captured for transportation to the zoo their lives are brutish and uncertain, living or dying at the whim of those stronger than them. In the zoo they are safe but dependant on their masters for food and water. They are kept in small cages and subject to a kind of ‘cabin fever’ as they are reliant on a tiny group of others for companionship and Vaughn portrays the pettiness and yes ‘cattiness’ that that claustrophic living-arrangement would breed.

Once free they are completely out of their depth. You would think that amongst wild animals at least, lions would have few worries about being threatened by other species, but they manage to come across one of the few carnivores that outclasses them - the bear.

Is this all not a very fascistic view of our place in the Universe? That only the strong have the right to decide who lives or dies and that the weak must bow down to power? I guess, put like that, it’s the view of those that instigated the invasion of Iraq.

To Vaughn’s credit of course, he does show that this way of things is tragic. We can see first-hand how victims such as Safa carry their trauma around with them for a lifetime. We can only see Ali’s optimism and innocence about the real world as something precious, the loss of which makes the world a sadder place.

Vaughn did say in a BBC4 interview that he wanted to tell a story about the victims, but in a way that would stop people ‘turning off’ as they do with virtually all of the news stories about so many more people dying in Iraq. His story does indeed dramatise the tragedy of a war-torn country and people caught up in tragic events over which they have virtually no control.

I wonder did Vaughn wish to have any longer-lasting effect on his readership beyond enjoyment of a well-told tale? It doesn’t seem to offer anything new by way of insights into living through a war. On the particulars of this war we get perhaps the bear as an anology of Saddam’s cruel and vicious regime and the pertinent point from the Turtle that it’s all about the oil….

Are there any readings I’m missing here? I’m pretty sure there is a bit more going on with the bear encounter for one thing.

Vaughn says in an interview - “I wanted to use this story to talk about my own conflicted feelings about the Iraq War.” I think his ‘conflicted feelings’ weaken the book somewhat. Perhaps patriotism or whatever steers him away from examining the cause of the bombing and the rights and wrongs of the occupation. Isn’t DC owned by Time Warner? Perhaps they wouldn’t have been able to publish a comic-book damning the architects of the war. Anyway, all of that is outside the pages of the book and I am chiefly looking here for anything I might have missed in the work itself.

I’ll admit my reading of this book is a simplistic one, but perhaps it is a simplistic tale. Thinking about it now, perhaps there is no other way to do justice to the victims of the war in Iraq than to tell a story devoid of easy solutions and happy endings.