300: Minutes and Men

I love comic books. I love superheroes, and horror comics, and magic comics and all that jazz. Comics often do things that few other mediums can do ("it's pictures and words, you can do anything with picture and words"). I collect them in monthly floppy format; I buy them in collection as trade paperbacks; I buy them as original graphic novels. It is a fascinating medium. It also, usually, doesn't take very long to read. I read one this weekend in less than 300 minutes.

Frank Miller's 300 is the story of 300 Spartan soldiers at the Battle of Thermopylae. Miller is most famous for Sin City and his Batman series The Dark Night Returns; 300 is similar in feeling, though not in content. While Miller is largely known for crime work, it is not the crime element that he does so well, but the toughness of the characters; and there are few tougher than the Spartans.

His style is very bare. He both wrote and drew this story and he uses the images to tell a lot, which reflects the Spartan action over Spartan words. The book has every element of a good drama (and will make a great movie this March). It has strong characters that you can get behind while not completely liking; it has smart characters that speak plainly but simply; it has blood. Lots of blood. This is not nice neat war, this is dirty war. This is kill a man and use him as shield; kill many men and build a wall. When the Persians come to fight the Spartans they know what will happen if they die.

The battle stems from Spartan pride, and, having little knowledge of how Greece worked at the time, a sense of united Greece. The Spartans know they are not Athenians (pussies!), but they see the valuable of each of the different states that made up Greece, and they fight for that. Repeatedly, King Leonidas talks about how Greeks are freemen, as opposed to the Persians who are following the Man-God Xerxes. Xerxes himself is a likable character as he only asks for the King to say that Xerxes is a step higher than Leonidas (with almost no other requirements). Leonidas, however, is free, and is willing to fight for that freedom.

I won't give away the end, but you can do the math (300 vs. 10,000). The book ultimately shows victory is defined by an individual, even in times of war, and treaties are not always the only prizes in war. It also shows how damn good comics can be, and that people should read them more.