Three #4

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

The shadow of Frank Miller's 300 continues to hang in provocative, nuanced, and ironic juxtaposition over Gillen's Three, many of 300's narrative turns being echoing or inverted.  The legendary glory of Leonidas' three hundred warriors—no doubt hyperbolized, but inextricably woven into the tapestry of Spartan self-idealization—is here diminished by the same force being mobilized against three helots rather than tens (perhaps hundreds) of thousands of Persians under Xerxes.  There is no victory, for instance, in the slaughter of three unarmed slaves, not even those they hunt, who by dire happenstance cross the path of the vengeful and punishing Spartan force under Kleomenes.  Yet, this is what Sparta commands.  The treachery of Ephialtes in showing the Persians the Anopaea Pass, a hidden goat trail to the rear of the Greek forces at Thermopylae, is mirrored in Aristodemos' deception of the three fugitives, trapping them in an obscure (and blocked) goat-path through the mountains.  It's all part of Gillen's tiered attempt to re-frame the Spartan mythos in more human terms.  No longer the valiant underdogs, they—like their fifth-century Persian counterparts—are now the seemingly unstoppable military machine bearing down on their overmatched quarry.

Three #4 makes some bold (and genuinely unexpected) narrative choices.  It gives voice to its readers' suspicions—or mine, at least—about Klaros' history from the clever Terpander:  "Those who seem like they can not fight no longer disturb the masters.  The Krypteia only cull the strong, after all.  Why not be a live wolf wrapped up in wool?" (Three #4: 7).  Klaros doesn't confirm Terpander's hypothesis, and given Gillen's propensity to misdirect, I wouldn't be surprised to find both us and Terpander mistaken.  By the final splash of the issue, as Klaros emerges from the narrow rock pass in full Spartan armor, the possibility that he may, in fact, not be a helot at all is tantalizing.  And it's not even the most startling character moment and plot twist in the issue!

For a story as deeply rooted and interested in historical plausibility as Three, Gillen admirably avoids stiff exposition.  Instead, he organizes his history around a series of social interactions precipitated by the helot murder of the ephor.  Information, for its part, is collected in the interview with Professor Stephen Hodkinson as a kind of academic epilogue.  There's some unfortunate mutual back-patting between the two, but the conversation elucidates both the history and Gillen's strategies in representing it.