300

300
Frank Miller and Lynn Varley

Before director Zach Snyder turned the story of Thermopylae into American cinema’s great gay epic, it was a scarcely less flamboyantly “out” comic book. I give Frank Miller credit, in this and his other work, for being an exciting visual stylist with a knack for deeply expressive blackness and jarring chiaroscuro, but his stories are even more juvenile than the usual superhero fare. Is it possible we are meant to take his tales of macho bloodletting without a grain of irony? Sadly, all signs point to his being in earnest. And yet these are marketed as adult comics!