If you’ve seen Zack Snyder’s bone-crunching movie adaptation before reading the book you’ll be surprised at the subtlety of Miller’s depiction of the violence. It’s an almost classical approach, rendering sequence obsolete by somehow capturing the entirety of a skirmish in a single borderless page. When fighting is depicted, Miller doesn’t hold back in terms of showing us the full horror of what’s happening, but he captures fragments of time, preferring epic, chaotic dioramas to multiple panels.

Xerxes’s soldiers are professional too but are coerced and beaten onto the battlefield, leaving the Greeks with ample opportunity to give them a good going over before their inevitable over-whelming.Īlthough the battle is the focus of the book, the fighting plays second fiddle to the characters. Alongside them stand a scraggy collection of part-timers, drawn together from neighbouring kingdoms. At least, those do that haven’t already been cast out for being too weak. Leonidas’s army is made from young men, barely more than boys, but the Spartans spend their childhoods training to nobly sacrifice themselves in battle, ready for a life of war. Xerxes, king and self-proclaimed god of the Persians, is a towering tyrant, interested in nothing more than his expansionist regime, struggling to fathom how anyone could stand in his path or turn down his generous and forcibly applied offers of servitude.

Leonidas, king of the Spartans, is depicted as a truly heroic figure, who Miller distils with an outlook on the world that is millennia ahead of his time. Miller builds an stunning vision of the ancient world and the larger-than-life characters who made it their own. In this beautifully illustrated book Miller retells the story of the Battle of Thermopylae, fought in 480 BC, when a relative handful of Spartans held off a vastly superior invading force of Persians using superior tactics, knowledge of local geography and an incredible reserve of bravery and strength.

One of his crowning glories slotted amongst the superheroes and the noir of Sin City though, in the form of 300. Frank Miller’s work in comics has been nothing short of phenomenal: he made his name in superhero comics in the 80s, created Sin City in the 90s, and has successfully transferred his skills to movies in the last few years.

The 300 frank miller