A quiet moment honoring a pact between the lions and the antelopes is countered by a bloody battle with monkeys.

So the comic relief provided by Ali, the lion cub, is offset by the brutal demise of a giraffe. “I never want readers to be comfortable, to feel like we’re in a comedy or a drama. “I want to most closely duplicate the feeling of life: one moment it’s humorous, the next it’s horrific,” he said. Vaughan’s work, most notably “Y: The Last Man,’’ his hugely popular science fiction series about a world in which all men but one are killed by a mysterious plague. This emotional sucker punch - gentle humor giving way to grim reality and violence - is a trademark of Mr. “Pride” opens with a peaceful scene of a sun-drenched savanna, where an increasingly frustrated lion confronts a bird who keeps repeating, “The sky is falling.” But any resemblance to a Disney fable is shattered on the very next page: the tranquil sky is disrupted by three American jet fighters the exotic terrain is revealed to be a zoo the lion’s eyes well up with emotion. The book, he added, “is about me exploring those questions.”

“ ‘Pride of Baghdad’ was born out of the fact that I had a lot of conflicted feelings about the war,” he said in a recent telephone interview from his home in West Hollywood. Vaughan’s most emotionally charged stories in a career filled with tales of science fiction, superheroes and the supernatural.

The tale, lushly illustrated by Niko Henrichon, was inspired by actual events and stands out as one of Mr. Vaughan’s personal brand of therapy arrives in the shape of “Pride of Baghdad,” a graphic novel (his first) about lions that escape a zoo in Iraq during an American bombing raid. Vaughan suffers for their enjoyment? “I start with something that makes me angry or confused, and then I write about it,” he said of his approach. DO comic book fans realize how much Brian K.

Pride of Baghdad by Brian K. Vaughan