Review: Three #1-5

Three was a 5-issue comic published by Image in 2013; it was written by Kieron Gillen and drawn by Ryan Kelly, with colours by Jordie Bellaire. I didn't hear about the series at the time it came out (probably because that was just after I'd quit my job at Marvel) but I became intrigued when I heard this series was written by Gillen as a response to Frank Miller's 300.

Now, I liked 300 when I first read it, though I have come to see some of the problems with that work. Gillen's particular bugaboo (as explained in the first issue's editorial) was that Miller's comic celebrated the Spartans as supposedly heroic defenders of liberty - yet they owned slaves, which makes all the declarations of liberty sound rather hollow. The Spartans' slaves - the Helots - are the protagonists of Three; three Helots, natch.

The series begins with a Helot rather unwisely reminding four Spartans of a time when a Helot murdered a Spartan general; the Spartans attempt to slaughter the Helots for their defiance but three of the Helots kill all but one of the Spartans. Knowing they're now marked for death, the three Helots flee across country while Sparta gathers an army to kill them.

Unlike most historical fiction, Gillen consulted with an actual historian about this series and the back matter in Three includes a series of back-and-forth between Gillen and Professor Stephen Hodgkinson. The single most fascinating thing I learned was that the Spartans didn't write down their own history; everything we know of them was written by other people. Considering that, it's especially odd that they've become so celebrated - history only wrote about them second-hand. Gillen calls this "the Spartan Mirage" in the back matter.

There's little glory to be found in Gillen, Kelly and Bellaire's story; the Helots obtain a sort of victory; the Spartans choose pragmatism over honour. Three depicts Spartan society as fascinatingly different, but horrific and unsustainable. I'd liked what I'd read of Gillen's work before, but this... this is the most riveting story of his that I've read.