Animal Farm for the 21st Century

Vaughan, Brian K., writer. Pride of Baghdad. Art by Niko Henrichon. Lettering by Todd Klein. New York: DC Comics, 2006. Print.

From page one, the vibrant color of this living, breathing graphic novel inhaled me into its pages. Eye candy though it was, I quickly realized that the sandy, apricot landscape not only projected sunny savannas over urban destruction, but it also imbued the unfolding events with a tragic sense of hopefulness. From panel to panel I roamed through this terrible and beautiful world with four lions as companions. Originally held in an Iraqi zoo, the animals escape during the confusion of an air raid. The rest of the story is really quite simple. It is a plight for survival and understanding of the new nature of their existence.

If the common association of animals with allegory were not obvious enough, the symbolism is entirely clear. Although numerous issues are confronted, such as the treatment of women in patriarchal societies of the Middle East, the principle concern of Pride of Baghdad is freedom: What is freedom? To what authority must one look for a definition of freedom? Can it be multiple things at once? Must it always come at the price of something else? These questions are only a few scraggly trees at the top of a mountain of ambiguity. At every point in the graphic novel the symbolism in which these themes and issues are couched  is clear, yet somehow Vaughan never sacrifices depth for clarity.

The beauty of this book is not just that it accurately reflects reality through metaphor, symbolism, and allegory, but that it also has the power to change that reality by offering a new perspective both intellectually and emotionally on a subject that enters into households every day through newspapers, the internet, and television. Reality is what one perceives and maintains through indifference or alters through action and attitudes. This graphic novel offers the vantage point necessary to affect that initial change in perspective. In the modern political climate where even ostentatiously impartial news networks seem to lack objectivity, Pride of Baghdad should be read by every thinking person because it rises above the inevitable lines of subjectivity and it confronts the one question that transcends political or religious affiliations: what it means to be human in the face of inhumanity.