Three #1

written by Kieron Gillen
art by Ryan Kelly
colors by Jordie Bellaire

Gillen is remarkably forthright about his new series.  In many ways Three is his answer to Frank Miller's 300, his highly influential and heavily mythologized account of Greek resistance against the Persian forces at Thermopylae.  For Miller, who's almost always more interested in mythology than history, legend than realism, the story—whatever the historical truth—is more interesting.  Miller writes Sparta more or less as the Spartans would see themselves.  It is, in other words, the Spartan fantasy.  300 easily and willingly accepts the invisibility of the other Greek states, Spartan slaves, and Thermopylae's historical embeddedness amid other military efforts which cumulatively led to the eventual rebuff of Xerxes' forces.  Gillen wants to tell another story.

Terpander:  "I know stories.  I know history.  I know where one starts and another begins." (Three #1: 20)

Just over a hundred years after the Battle of Thermopylae, the naval battles of Artemisium and Salamis—all in 480 B.C.E.—and the Battle of Plataea the next year, the defeat which finally precipitated a complete Persian withdrawal from Greece, Gillen's story begins.  Three helots—crippled Klaros, Damar, and slick-tongued city-slave Terpander—working on a farm in the Laconian countryside find themselves compelled hosts to Spartan ephor Eurytos and his haughty son Arimnestos.  Because of Terpander's loose tongue, defiant wit, and an excess of undiluted wine, his story—a prickly reminder of Sparta's costly helot revolts and the loss of fertile Messenia—insults their guests and incites a slaughter.  Eurytos is unamused by Terpander's antics and gives him a painful, bloody reminder that for every successful helot revolt over their Spartan rulers there are thousands helot massacres, and he will add one to that number.

By his own admission, Gillen's tale is, as much as possible, relentlessly historical.  Despite the scholarly difficulty in reconstructing Spartan history—which makes it "awkward academically speaking"—Three is a relatively remarkable feat of historically credible storytelling.

Kelly's artwork is heavy and thick but fantastically kinetic, particularly the issue's final full-page illustration—a dynamic slaughter around the unmoving, seated ephor.  But the finest visual presentation is the gorgeous cover art, designed by colorist Jordie Bellaire.  It's a glowing, evocative homage to Greek vase painting and a stunning tribute to the elegance of Greek armor design.