In every Look Back, we examine a comic book issue from 10/25/50/75 years ago (plus a wild card every month with a fifth week in it). This time around, we had back twenty-five years to May 1998 for the debut of Frank Miller and Lynn Varley's 300.

In the late 1980s, there was a major debate in the comic book industry that has now been mostly forgotten. It was about a proposal to require warning labels on DC comic books that featured "mature content." A number of creators objected to the idea vociferously, with Marv Wolfman even losing his editorial gig at DC over his objections to the idea. And then...DC added "mature content" warning labels and no one has cared for over 30 years. So it was a bit of an anti-climactic result, but one of the longer lasting ramifications of the controversy was that Frank Miller refused to work with DC on his creator-owned projects, choosing instead to leave for Dark Horse Comics

Miller's first two projects at Dark Horse, Hard Boiled and Give Me Liberty, were full-color books drawn by other artists (Geoff Darrow and Dave Gibbons, respectively), but when Miller finally started doing art for Dark Horse, it was on Sin City, an acclaimed noir crime story that naturally lent itself to a black and white format, and sure enough, that's what Miller did. His art for Dark Horse was then almost always on the Sin City stories throughout the 1990s, but in 1998, he debuted his first color work, working with his longtime collaborator, colorist/painter Lynn Varley (Miller and Varley were married at the time) on 300 #1.

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What was 300 about?

300 was a fictionalized adaptation of the Battle of Thermopylae during the Persian invasion of Sparta, as well as the events leading up to the battle, from the perspective of King Leonidas of Sparta (which was then a city-state in Greece).

As a boy, Miller was a big fan of the 1962 film, The 300 Spartans, by director Rudolph Maté, one of the virtuoso cinematographers of the Golden Age of Hollywood. It's really a gorgeous-looking film, and you can easily see how the film stuck in the mind of the inventive mind of the young Miller...

The 300 Spartans movie

See how striking the use of color is in that photo? Such a gorgeous looking film, and you can see that it was a massive influence on Miller as he and Varley depicted the Spartan soldiers in the book, which was notable for being 26 pages long, but really just 13, since each "page" was a double-page spread (the hardcover collected the series in landscape format so that the pages could each be one page instead of two pages next to each other)...

The opening three pages (or opening six pages, if you were) simply depict Leonidas and his men marching...just marching, with Miller really getting in just how GRUELING this whole thing was...

The Spartans marching

When one of the soldiers stumbles, he is brutalized by one of his superiors, but Leonidas shows off his strength of character when he steps in and knocks out the superior, sparing the young soldier...but also making the young soldier carry his unconscious superior on his back for the rest of the march.

When they rest at night, they tell stories, and one of the stories is about young Leonidas, showing how he killed a wolf in battle, and gained a fur coat in the process...

The origin of Leonidas

Already, Miller has painted a pretty complete picture of Leonidas, but the key sequence is at the end of the issue.

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What was the pop culture legacy of 300?

The final sequence of the book shows a Persian messenger visit Sparta and essentially tell Leonidas to bow down to King Xerxes. A fascinating examination can be seen between how Miller and Varley handle this sequence and how the scene was then handled by Zack Snyder in the hit 2007 film, 300. Snyder famously decided to do one of the most faithful attempts of adapting a comic book as humanly possible (well, outside the 2005 Sin City adaptations, where director Robert Rodriguez just let Miller literally co-direct the film adaptation), but even while being extremely faithful, scenes can be seen differently, and I find it interesting to see how Snyder and Miller differed in this sequence.

Leonidas decides to defy Xerxes and has the messenger killed, with the man telling him that this behavior is madness, to which Leonidas replies, "No, this is Sparta."

Leonidas says this is Sparta

Compare that to Snyder's take on the scene...

It's a fine take on the scene, but it's interesting that now, Gerard Butler's Leonidas is screaming "THIS IS SPARTA!" Totally different read on the same scene, but both work well, and obviously Snyder's take become iconic in and of itself.

300 was a great statement of Miller's remained force as a creator, as while Sin City was quite successful, it was a whole other genre, so tackling this material was a big risk for Miller, but he delivered in a big way.

If you folks have any suggestions for June (or any other later months) 2013, 1998, 1973 and 1948 comic books for me to spotlight, drop me a line at brianc@cbr.com! Here is the guide, though, for the cover dates of books so that you can make suggestions for books that actually came out in the correct month. Generally speaking, the traditional amount of time between the cover date and the release date of a comic book throughout most of comic history has been two months (it was three months at times, but not during the times we're discussing here). So the comic books will have a cover date that is two months ahead of the actual release date (so October for a book that came out in August). Obviously, it is easier to tell when a book from 10 years ago was released, since there was internet coverage of books back then.