Three #2

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

One hundred years gone from Sparta's triumphal defeat at Thermopylae, a stand that entrenched them as one of Greece's strongest city-states, and Sparta has changed.  Leuktra stands foremost in their memory, the ignominious loss to Thebes despite near equal forces and a king to command them.  Even the stories they tell are changing: Lycurgus' fable of the hound and the house dog no longer allows for the house dog.  As Tyrtaios remarks to Kleomenes, son of Kleombrotus, "When you were young, Sparta ruled Greece.  We could afford to think less of ourselves" (Three #2: 14).

Despite the helots Terpander, Damar and Klaros being the titular "three" and presumably the central figures in Gillen's historical chase thriller, Kleomenes is thus far his best character achievement.  He is the other king of Sparta—beside Agesilaos, always on campaign in North Africa and the Near East—and son of the disgraced Kleombrotus, who died mysteriously in prison, reportedly a suicide.  He, it seems, alone sees the irony in his given task: the march of three hundred Spartan hippeis in pursuit of three fugitive slaves, an irony made more visible and consequential by Gillen's strongly implicit analogy to Miller's classic 300.

"Then let this bloody farce begin."  (21)

Three doesn't shy away from the violent and bloody truth of survival.  His characters—to a man—are killers.  Klaros may be the most accomplished with a sword, but Terpander seems to take a vengeful and sadistic glee in turning the tables on the Spartan ephor and his guard.  The Spartan state wields fear against its subjected populations with a heavy hand.  It is a world that sees no value in the house hound, only the hunter.  It is a world made less for glory than survival.

So far Three is more a portrait of an historical moment, a society in the inevitable ebb of history caught between the traditions that once made them great and the demands of an evolving world, than it is a story proper.  And it's so compelling and rich as such that it doesn't feel any poorer for its sluggish narrative start.  But even so, by the end of Three #2, that stands to change and the manhunt for the three surviving helots begins in earnest.