Pride of Baghdad

In the spring of 2003, American bombs fell on Baghdad. The city’s zoo was hit, its gates blown open, and four lions walked free into a war zone for the first time in their lives. This is their story.

Pride of Baghdad is a standalone original graphic novel by Brian K. Vaughan and Niko Henrichon, published by Vertigo in 2006. It’s an animal story in the tradition of Watership Down — a survival epic told entirely from the perspective of the lions who escaped the Baghdad Zoo during the American bombing of Iraq, and one of the most devastating anti-war comics ever published.

Lions in the Ruins

The book follows four lions with very different ideas about freedom: Zill, the aging, battle-scarred patriarch who has known nothing but captivity; Safa, his mate, blind in one eye from a rocket attack, who fears the world beyond the zoo walls; Noor, the young female who believes freedom is worth any price; and Ali, the cub who sees everything for the first time. As the pride roams the bombed-out streets of Baghdad, they encounter the full wreckage of war — burned tanks, fleeing soldiers, an orphaned bear — and are forced to decide what freedom actually costs.

Vaughan’s script treats the lions as characters with real interior lives, never turning them into cutesy cartoon animals, and Henrichon’s lush, painterly art — which earned the book an Eisner Award nomination — makes every page feel like a gallery painting. The LA Times called it “deeply moving,” and Publishers Weekly gave it a starred review, praising how “Vaughan has his marvelously imagined characters debate the concept of freedom versus desire for safety.”

A 20th Anniversary hardcover edition, published by Image Comics, is available now — the perfect way to revisit the book that proved comics could speak for those who can’t. Pride of Baghdad is essential reading for fans of Y: The Last Man, literary comics, and anyone who believes a story about animals can say more about war than any battle report.