Frank Miller's 300

With the movie coming out this Friday, it seemed like a good time to talk about the comic book on which it was based. Frank Miller saw a movie about the Battle of Thermopylae when he was a kid, and was apparently so fascinated with it that he decided to write his own version after becoming a God of comic books. The result was 300.

It's bloody, it's epic, it's cinematic, it's full of big pages of striking art. Not much dialogue, when people talk in this book, they get right to the point. Fitting, since most every character is a warrior, and giving them Shakespearean monologues would seem silly. But this is essentially an all-action book. There's a little exposition and then it's time to go to war.

And it works really well. The art brings life to Leonidas, which is important given the scarcity of words. The action sucks you in and - even if you know what's going to happen - keeps you wanting to charge through pages to devour it.

When reading it, I kept thinking it would make an excellent movie, if done right. And after Sin City, I started to think maybe Robert Rodriguez should take a stab at it, but it looks like Zack Snyder has done an excellent job. From the trailers, it looks like a lot of the scenes are extremely faithful to the book, so I'm very excited. I also like that it's a movie based on a comic book based on a movie based on historical events. The mind boggles.