The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund (CBLDF) is fighting the good fight against comic book censorship, a problem that has plagued the industry for decades. In order to better educate myself, and by extension Therefore I Geek’s readership, I am starting a periodic series in which I will read all of the books in the CBLDF’s list of banned book case studies and discuss them. These blog articles will take the opportunity to evaluate the material on its own merits, as well as in the larger context of censorship and why these books were banned. To kick off this new series, I’ll be discussing Brian K. Vaughan’ Pride of Baghdad.
In March of 2003, a US led coalition began airstrikes in preparation for the invasion of Iraq. As a result of the airstrikes, four lions from the Baghdad zoo escaped from their enclosure and began wandering the streets. Pride of Baghdad tells the story of these lions, using their journey as an allegory for discussing the invasion itself and exploring the some of the philosophy that surrounded it. At the time the book was published in 2006, the war’s outcome was far from clear, as a civil war was just beginning and the book makes no attempt to predict the future beyond the obvious idea that no matter what the outcome, things will never been the same in Iraq. Continue reading
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