I don’t think I’ve blogged about this and I keep meaning to!
I received a copy of ‘Pride of Baghdad‘ for christmas, the new graphic novel by Brian K Vaughan. It’s an amazing book. If you have the means, I definately reccomend picking it up. (if you don’t, then get your booty over to the library and at least check it out!)
The story is relatively simple – when Baghdad was bombed, 4 lions got out of the zoo and wandered the city.
The thing about this story is that it can be read about a million different ways. You can just read it through once, pretending it’s all real, that somehow Vaughan met these lions and learned their thoughts and wrote them down. You can read it like an animal rights tale and what living in the zoo does to them. Or the angle of how nature reacts to man, and how things that man does and thinks are normal are in fact, very unnatural. You can take it to the next step and read it as a metaphor for the war in Iraq. Or the next step and see it as a story of human history and the cycles we fall into.
It’s a beautiful, beautiful book. As soon as I finished it, I was torn – it was so heart breaking that I never wanted to see it again, but at the same time, I wanted to go thru and read it closer to find the layers of meaning and nuance in the tale.
This one will stay on my top ten list for a long time.
orangerful 