The Sheriff of Babylon #2 “The Things They Left Behind” (March 2016)



The Story: Nassir the middle aged Iraqi cop reluctantly accepts the job of working with Chris Henry to investigate the murder of Ali Al Fahar. Nassir describes Saffiya al Aqani as Chris’ “famous girlfriend.”



At an Iraqi council meeting, Saffiya and a Kurdish leader discuss the three executed American soldiers from last issue; their bodies have been found. Before disappearing, they had been implicated in the rape of a girl from Saffiya’s clan. No one is going to look too hard for the executioner, whom we know to be Nassir. A better look at Saffiya reveals a large horizontal scar across the middle of her face, whose origin we never learn. Later, she talks with her servant about the days when she herself was a servant cleaning a giant mansion in America.



Chris and Nassir visit the morgue to check out Ali Al Fahar’s corpse. The coroners ask Nassir: is another corpse nearby the same man they’re looking at in a video, getting his throat slit? Nassir knows the Americans can’t tell Iraqis apart and wouldn’t trust his claim that it’s a different man, so he feigns forensic expertise and claims that the manner of the cut on the corpse doesn’t match the one in the video. The inexperienced coroners fall for his cockamamie story, and we see his pragmatic approach in action.



Chris, and Nassir visit Ali Al Fahar’s family but find they’re all dead, and the cat is munching on a corpse.



My Two Cents: Our opinion of Nassir softens somewhat as we learn that his execution of the three soldiers in his b basement had an element of justice to it, though still an element of misplaced vengeance for his dead daughters, who died in some other tragedy. Chris and Nassir are shaping up into a sort of buddy cop pair, with Chris as the mild “good cop.”

The Sheriff of Babylon #4 “The Dream and the Desert” (May 2016)



The Story: Thanks to an armored car, Saffiya survived the attack last issue, and she regales an American medic with the background of her name, which comes from a Jewish princess who (in the Islamic account) was abused by her first husband and was glad to be rescued by and then married to Muhammad. Saffiya learns that she is pregnant (presumably with Chris’ child) but will probably miscarry due to the shock of the tumbling car from last issue.



Chris has a terrible scare with an over-eager street vendor kid who puts his hands into his bag too quickly and almost gets his head blown off by Chris.



After his meeting with Abu Rahim the jihadi leader, Nassir is taken by two goons to the mosque for prayer time. His wife Fatima is waiting there, posing as a derelict and hiding a shotgun in her robes. She waxes the two goons. Nassir knows he is no longer safe on the streets, so he and Fatima take refuge with Chris in the Green Zone.



Saffiya comes to consult with Chris and Nassir about Abu Rahim. She agrees to help find his whereabouts so the American commandos can take him out; presumably he is responsible for the death of Ali Al Fahar, since the investigation into Fahar’s death is what precipitated Nassir’s detainment, and perhaps even the RPG attack on Saffiya’s car.



My Two Cents: OK, here’s my first actual gripe with Mitch Gerad’s art on this series. This page looks very much like a single image that has been cut-and-pasted with a zoom-in on each panel. The lines keep getting thicker and thicker, and with a few tiny exceptions, the art looks identical. John Cassaday does this too, and I am very much not a fan of the practice. We are paying for art. Give us art, not copied images. Especially when a character is delivering a monologue. There ought to be some variation in facial expression from one panel to the other. Otherwise, why not just render the whole thing in one big panel with one big word balloon, and use the rest of the page for background detail instead of the repeating the same image? It saves time, but I don’t know why an artist would be proud of this sort of shortcut, and I don’t know why editorial would condone it.



As for the content of Saffiya's story: She too bears "the mark of the Sheriff's blow" since "the Sheriff" in this series is Nassir, who was complicit in the shaming and deaths of her family. The scar on her face probably relates to Baathist abuses as well.

The notion of Saffiya as a princess is very important; it defines how she sees herself with respect to Iraq, and how she sees Iraq with relationship to the world. She's a sovereign struggling to make a place for her kingdom in a world with some much bigger Empires intruding upon her domain.  There's an obvious parallel between her character and Princess Kalista in Tom King's 2015 The Omega Men series, which is very much about Iraq despite its space opera setting.

The Sheriff of Babylon #6 “God Shed His Grace on Thee” (July 2016)



The Story: Saffiya takes Nassir's information about jihadi leader Abu Rahim to the American general. He receives it, but he’s not going to give any information to her in return.



An NCIS team led by “Bob” comes to take Nassir away for further questioning about his connection to Abu Rahim. His wife Fatima panics, thinking they are investigating the three American soldies that Nassir executed. Things escalate, and the NCIS team shoots Fatima dead, mistakenly thinking she had a gun.



My Two Cents: Ugh, gut punch. What an ironic issue title; Fatima certainly had America shed some terrible “grace” upon her. Now we know why we got all of last issue to get attached to Fatima, before she dies horribly and avoidably in this issue. Saffiya is unwittingly culpable, having linked Nassir to Abu Rahim in the minds of the American intelligence community. Fatima is like Virginia Vision in Tom King's The Vision, hiding a corpse and then dying because of it.



There’s a tragicomic moment when Bob the NCIS agent tries to command Fatima’s compliance in her own language. His vocabulary is OK, but the nuance comes across ludicrously. Just another example of Americans not really knowing what they are doing here.



Saffiya has a telling exchange with her Kurdish colleague, who is venting his frustrations. It’s impossible to please the Americans, because there are so many of them, and they don’t speak with one voice; they have different and incompatible agendas among their factions, which is exactly what we saw happening between Chris and Bob in this issue. (Is Iraq any different among its warring tribes?) He compares the situation to the polytheism which dominated before Muhammad imposed monotheism on Mecca. When will some prophetic figure arise to enforce uniformity? Sometimes it feels like a dictator would be safer; at least the expected behavior might be predictable. If he were a predictable dictator, that is. But of course many political figures are unsettlingly erratic.



We can’t help but wonder: Nassir had some role in the deaths of Saffiya’s family during Saddam’s rule. Is the current situation all a mistake, or is there any element of payback on her part?

The Sheriff of Babylon #8 “Let Us Go” (September 2016)



The Story: The opening pages flash back to a vacation Nassir took in Jordan with his wife and three daughters. They visited Petra and floated in the Dead Sea. A voiceover from Franklin recounts the brutality that Saffiya's family received from Saddam Hussein and the Baath Party, how she started working with Nassir, and the tragedy that befell Nassir's children. Franklin is retrieving Nassir from NCIS custody.



Saffiya convinces Abu Rahim to visit her home after Friday prayers and claim Nassir. There, it is hoped, the Americans will nab or kill Abu Rahim.



Chris and Nassir retrieve Fatima’s body from the morgue and bury her, wrapped in a Superman bedsheet, in the bombed building where Chris and Fatima had their drinking session in issue #5. The priceless ancient idol figurine left here previously is nowhere to be found.



My Two Cents: Franklin tells us how during Saddam’s reign, Nassir fed Saffiya the coordinates of bombing targets in Iraq, as well as coordinates not to be bombed, like his own house. Through some tragic mixup, his house ended up on the “bomb here” list, and his daughters were killed. We’re left again with the nagging question of whether Saffiya engineered that “accident” in revenge for her own family’s deaths. This fits with the title, which could refer either to Nassir’s release from NCIS, or to the generational grudges that result in cycles of violence.

The Sheriff of Babylon #10 “The Founding Fathers” (November 2016)



The Story: The conversation at Saffiya’s house continues. Abu Rahim congratulates himself on daring to don a suicide vest; it shows how brave he must be. He and Saffiya and Nassir argue for a while. Saffiya is supposed to call the CIA to confirm Abu Rahim’s presence in her house, but his suicide vest changes the equation, so she bides her time.



Back outside the CIA Ops room, NCIS Bob explains how Ali Al Fahar fooled the Americans in sending a midnight assault squad to wipe out a
clandestine Christian meeting, thinking it was a terrorist gathering.



My Two Cents: This issue is about taking credit; everybody wants to be a “Founding Father,” to leave a legacy like George Washington. Abu Rahim imagines Al Qaeda as the new American Revolution, with himself as George Washington. NCIS Bob clearly wants to move up in the ranks; he tries to paint himself as the architect of every successful mission, while the ones that went bad were not his fault. Saffiya is much the same; her role in the American invasion of Iraq is really very small, but she sees herself as a mastermind who manipulated America into destroying Saddam to avenge her family.



At one point, Abu Rahim and Nassir have a “tough guy” contest in which Abu Rahim keeps smacking Nassir to the floor; Saffiya intervenes to terminate it prematurely. The same thing happens in Mister Miracle #1 between Orion and Scott Free, with Barda intervening. Another example of Tom King feeling at liberty to re-use ideas from his Vertigo war stories in his mainstream superhero stories.