Pride of Baghdad by Brian K. Vaughan and Niko Henrichon

The precedent set for anthropomorphic comic books or cartoons is that the animals will, in some way, be illustrated to highlight human emotions and enable a connection with the reader that wouldn't be present from a realistic drawing. Whether it's simplifying the character to a cartoon abstraction as Gary Larson would in The Far Side, or adding human characteristics such as emotive eyebrows as you would find in Disney's lions. It is to the credit of Vaughan and Henrichon that they rely on neither of these.

The art is representational throughout. Henrichon's style is one of the most realistic that you will find in comics. This services the story told as its main characters a small group of lions, the titular Pride. We see the entire story over the shoulders of these lions, and the dialogue is where we get the emoting. Vaughan is capable and adept at deciding how the visual flow of the page should come, in fact he's one of the best out of the list of writer's who exclusively write, it's just that his command of the words allows him to let the art work on it's own rather than as a crutch to support the writing. Of course, great comics aren't made without the art complementing the words, but when trying to compose a story that uses formal play (lions who are in every way animal except for the thoughts they speak to one another in word ballons) it's important to not let the method become the message.

A story set in Iraq in 2003, while Baghdad was being bombed and occupied, is naturally going to be a divisive topic in a country where politics is the ultimate symbol of division. Vaughan mitigates this by keeping his proselytizing to himself. His one overt comment (the last line of the book) is kept covert enough by its careful wording. In this country we're so constantly reminded that artists are liberals and the military is conservative that it is difficult for me to avoid deciding the political stance of a comics author before I read a comic that references politics. And I've read enough Brian K. Vaughan comics to think of him as a liberal. This book, however, does a wonderful job of staying off the soapbox and simply telling a story. He infuses his animal characters with such humanity that I found myself as picturing them as humans rather than the cartoon delineations that we are all familiar with.

The story does feel a bit filled out, as though it could have been told in half as many pages, but Henrichon's art is so strong that it provides a visceral thrill when you take the story out of the occasion. Realistic, but with the immediacy of life drawing studies, he holds control of the page by covering all the bases in what would frequently be a team effort. Normally we would have a separate inker, or at least colorist on a DC comic, but Henrichon handles everything except lettering himself. It allows him to produce some pages with what looks like digital inking, some with what looks like scanned pencils, and others with traditional inks that are colored in the same rendered color as every other page in the book. He has enough control over his computer coloring that he can make pages that are rendered with different techniques flow together seamlessly.

While this book is not quite the masterwork I was hoping for (I believe that Vaughan will one day helm a short work that will match the quality of his outstanding longer works, Y the Last Man and Ex Machina), it is certainly a proud (ugh) addition to my library.