300: The Comic
Written by Mark Osborne
Published on 03/20/2007
Originally from Binary Culture / [the-lowdown.net]
http://www.binaryculture.net

As “This is Sparta!” bellowed in Gerard Butler’s defiant roar echoes across the collective unconscious for the next decade or so, nowhere near enough people will trace it back to it’s pen and ink origins. As we should all know by now, comic book movies do not and never will create new comic book readers or a “crossover audience” as is the parlance of the times. Comic book movies are simply another revenue stream for the rights holders, which do in part help to fund the industry as a whole but don’t kid yourself when you walk into your local comic book store and see a big display with a stack of 300 hardcovers. It’s not there for people who raced out of the movie theatre and just had to see where the movie came from. It’s for the people who come in every week who either didn’t know about 300 until the movie or hadn’t been compelled to pick it up until the movie came around. This has been true since shortly after the release of the first Spiderman movie when sales of underoos with everyone’s favorite webslinger on them shot up ten times higher than the comics did in the same span of time.

To paraphrase Grant Morrison, people go see superhero movies because they go see movies and ostensibly have some vague knowledge of or attachment to the character from their youth. So with that in mind, this review is not for people that stumbled out of the movie theatre screaming that they’re going to go dine in Hell. They can go the fuck back to their trailer parks and crack open another Budweiser as all memory of the movie fades from their minds under the onslaught of NASCAR races flickering across their televisions. If you’re offended by that, replace it with a stereotype of whatever your demographic is, political correctness is not my modus operandi. This review is for people who read comics and have a passable knowledge of Frank Miller, the Goddamnfather of contemporary comic books.

As most everyone is willing to acknowledge, Frank Miller did his best work in the late eighties and became either irrelevant or a pariah somewhere around 2001, when he released the embarrassing Dark Knight Strikes Again and shortly thereafter underwent a frightening personal transformation from what seemed like a very libertarian political stance to a maniacal neo conservative jingoist, the classic tragic victim of Crisis Theory.

Thus 300 is essentially Miller’s last relevant and outstanding work. It might seem unfair to eulogize his career at the apex of his global fame, but after seeing interviews regarding “Holy Terror, Batman!” I find it the only sane characterization. If I hadn’t read Miller’s phenomenal, paradigm shattering Elektra: Assassin, I wouldn’t hesitate in crowning 300 the best comic of his career. Surely the hardcover edition is the best presented though (Elektra: Assassin languishes in a trade paperback edition over a decade old and is considered to be a find worthy of awe and surprise for convention goers in the know), with the now iconic helmeted profile shot of Leonidas flanked by the blood spattered logo.

The lush end pages, painted by Miller’s wife and frequent collaborator Lynn Varley, are nothing short of breathtaking even if they are highly abstract. They set the bar for the rest of her contribution to the comic, which is to be sure the best coloring of her career, the palette of which is painstakingly preserved in the promotional material of the film. While I wouldn’t put it in the same league as the beautiful and evocative choices Ross Campbell made for The Abandoned, Varley’s work on 300 deftly captures the feel and character of both the narrative and the setting. It really makes one wish that she hadn’t discovered Photoshop three years later and used it to produce the psychedelic vomit that characterized The Dark Knight Strikes Again.

Miller is equally at the top of his game here, leaving both his Sin City work of the same period (the later volumes, such as Family Values, were written well into the late 90s) and everything he’s drawn since in the dust. Or rather broken and bleeding at the bottom of a very deep well.

Miller’s key achievement in drawing 300 was his ability to step back and alter his idiosyncratic style to suit the setting and tone of the narrative in a way that he’s never done in any of his other work. It stands out most in renderings of Leonidas who is abstracted to appear in the most consummately mythic Greek manner possible, the sharp pointed features so ubiquitous in Ancient Greek pottery, while the rest of the Greek characters have fairly standard Miller features. Xerxes also stands out, but not for his garish costuming. Rather I’ve never seen Miller work anywhere near that hard to portray a man as being so fine featured before. There’s a subtle feminine elegance to his portrayal that clashes fiercely with the ostensibly testosterone fueled narrative, and rightly so given that Xerxes is a complete foil to Leonidas.

However, much of the comic is also classic Miller in all of the best ways. In one particular scene where a Spartan jumps at a Persian slave driver with his whip at the ready, he does it with the same impossible arrogant nonchalance as Sin City’s Miho. His sword isn’t sailing over his head, but lazily gripped in one hand and facing away from him. It’s hardly realistic, but it says a massive amount about the character and how he views the situation, again much like the impassive and quietly self confident Miho. For more echoes of Sin City in 300, the Persian harem women that entertain the hunchback strike many of the same poses and are drawn using the same negative space techniques as Miller uses for Nancy Callahan.

Miller is at his most innovative since Elektra: Assassin in 300, especially given the unconventional dimensions of the page. The wider, shorter pages make the comic appear more cinematic than the standard comic page as it seems to approximate the letterbox ratio, which lends the film much of its visual power. The opening of the first trailer that sees the Spartans pushing the Persians over the cliff in slow motion in time with Nine Inch Nails’ Just Like You Imagined is powerful to be sure, but is overpowered by Miller’s original image as it powerfully declares the opening of the first day of the battle.

While Miller is in very, very comfortable territory with his interpretation of the Battle of Thermopylae, he lets Leonidas’ voice be the dominant one in the narrative rather than having him be the mouthpiece for Miller’s classic film noir running interior dialogue. For the majority of the comic we see the world through Leonidas eyes, a tour de force if ever one was possible in sequential art. There are no apologies or condemnations to be had here; this is simply a presentation of the events as the Spartans see them. The intention is clearly to sweep the reader along in their enthusiasm and valor, but there are no external narrative cues towards that end. Miller wisely lets his art be the argument in favor of cheering on and mythologizing his vision of the Spartans, who come off as being the antiquarian version of the US Marine Corps were they to have a city state of their own.

Of course there’s been a great deal of noise regarding the historical accuracy of Miller’s vision since the release of the film, but we’re not witnessing the bullheaded, eye rolling idiocy of Mel Gibson ignoring history to create a near pornographic bloodbath (yes, Apocalyptico I’m looking at you). There’s no lazy, borderline racist interpolation of what amounts to historical conspiracy theory here. Miller did his homework for 300, even including a bibliography at the back of the book as a way of encouraging the reader to follow up on the actual historical details involved.

Not to be crass, but to hold 300 up to the light of recorded history is to do the same to William Shakespeare’s Julius Cesar. It’s hardly relevant if he actually said “Et Tu, Brute?” or not, as it’s clearly a poetic flourish added to fuel the drama. In a more vulgar way, this is what Miller has done with the recorded history of the Battle of Thermopylae; give it new life and drama to be enjoyed for its own sake. It’s also incredibly important to remember how thoroughly the Greeks mythologized their own recorded history, because unless you believe in the objective existence of the Greek pantheon, it’d be hard to argue that the surviving account of the Battle of Troy is in any way historically accurate, or Odysseus’s adventures on his way home from said battle.

300 shines as an often overlooked gem in the vast and celebrated canon of Frank Miller’s career, even garnering less attention than abysmal failures such as The Dark Knight Strikes Again or it’s triumphant but deeply flawed predecessor The Dark Knight Returns. Then again it always seems like Miller’s weaker works are trumpeted and triumphed while his best work remains marginalized and ignored. Thankfully, the movie has thrust it back into prominence in the comic book world, where it will hopefully finally be given the respect it deserves among Miller’s comic work, if not in the industry as a whole. Madness you say? THIS IS SPARTA!