Reviews / Society and Animals 15 (2007) 401-408 405

A Graphic Novel Depicting War as an Interspecies Event: Pride of . Brian K. Vaughan, Niko Henrichon (Art). Vertigo/DC Comics, 2006. $19.99

Introduction Writer Brian K. Vaughan and artist Niko Henrichon have created a graphic novel that resists camouflaging impulses of willful euphemism when it comes to nonhuman animal victims of war in their hauntingly beautiful Pride of Baghdad. Th is graphic novel, like “Th e Animals’ War” at the Imperial War Museum in London and its catalog, Th e Animals War: Animals in Wartime from the First World War to the Present Day (Gardiner, 2006), recasts war as an interspecies event. Th e text implicitly asks whether the fantasy world of talking animals—indebted to Rud- yard Kipling, George Orwell, and Walt Disney—enhances or distracts from a topic like war. As thousands of human lives are lost in , should anyone—even animal rights activists—care about the fate of four lions after their accidental “liberation” from Baghdad’s zoo? And if sympathy for suffering animals seems justified alongside mourning of human losses, is the popular anthropomorphizing device of talking animals necessary to generate empathy? We bring two very different perspectives to this review: One of us teaches a course on animals in literature; the other teaches courses in comics as literature. Our subtext is a shared interest in the challenges animals pose in popular representations. In this case, hybrid animals in a hybrid text test readers’ assumptions about whose stories matter, how stories of speechless creatures might be told though words and images, and what perspec- tives we neglect when we assess the impact of politics, violence, and war solely from a human perspective. Vaughan authors two, ongoing comic-book series, Ex Machina (an audacious take on the superhero genre after 9/11) and Y: Th e Last Man, an apocalyptic tale of the survivors (including a lone man and monkey) of a plague wiping out all males. He is well-trained in balancing the requirements of pulp adventure with pointed social commentary. Artist Hen- richon provides largely realistic, often violent images in contrast to the more common comic book depiction of animals as cute, upright, and clothed. Except for their articulated thoughts, the characters in Pride of Baghdad resemble actual animals. Th ey are driven by basic survival instincts rather than recognizably human motivations. Henrichon inks and colors his work, in contrast to the usual division of artistic labor in mainstream comics’ production. Vaughan and Henrichon’s text has already achieved a “cross-over” success that remains elusive for most “graphic novels” that only reach a core audience of fans. Reviews and inter- views in mainstream media testify to the book’s broad reception, including a book signing at the Arab American National Museum in Dearborn, Michigan. Obviously, the work’s status as a “comic book” set in the current Iraq war merits attention, but its tight focus on animals rather than humans (who barely appear) may be more daring that its setting. Like its most significant precursor, Spiegelman’s (1986, 1991), two-volume Maus, Pride of Bagh- dad relies upon what even now seems a surprising juxtaposition: Both are explicitly grim tales of war in a form still often associated with children and the Sunday “funnies.” Both are told through talking animals, drawing upon a long tradition rarely (in comics at least)

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2007 DOI: 10.1163/156853007X235564

SSOANOAN 115,4_f7-f8_400-408.indd5,4_f7-f8_400-408.indd 405405 110/23/070/23/07 9:38:079:38:07 AMAM 406 Reviews / Society and Animals 15 (2007) 401-408

taken seriously as a way to address grave matters, although comic animals—from George Herriman’s Krazy Kat to Bill Watterson’s , Hobbes—have often spoken words of wis- dom (with Char