Zack Snyder’s 300 Was Adapted from a Frank Miller Comic Book

Director Zack Snyder‘s 300 (airing on SYFY this month) remains a standout piece of his filmography, an operatic action epic based on one of the most famous battles in the history of the ancient world. It’s a film still revered among Snyder fans for its heightened reality, production design, and screenplay in which every line sounds more legendary than the last. 

But 300 didn’t just spring to life on the big-screen. For its origins as a cinematic adventure which looks and sounds the way it does, we have to go back, not necessarily all the way to Ancient Sparta, but to the work of one of comics’ most famous creators.

Zack Snyder’s 300 was adapted from a Frank Miller comic book

In Snyder’s film, King Leonidas of Sparta (Gerard Butler) leads an elite group of 300 soldiers (supported by a few thousand other Greek warriors) to the narrow pass at Thermopylae, where they hope to hold off a vast Persian army and, in the process, save all of Greece from invasion. As history buffs will know, Thermopylae was a real place, and a real battle was fought there between the Greeks and the Persians in 480 B.C.E. It’s remembered today as one of the most famous last stands in history, and the 300 Spartans, while not the only combatants on the Greek side, have been heavily mythologized as a near-unstoppable fighting force who heroically held off a vastly superior Persian force.

In 1998, comic book writer and artist Frank Miller set out to tell his own version of the Thermopylae story in a five-issue limited series published by Dark Horse Comics. Miller was then best-known for his work on iconic superhero characters like Daredevil and Batman, but during his time with Dark Horse he’d branched out to create worlds of his own with Sin City. With 300, he sought to merge that instinct with a real historical event.

Like the film, the 300 comic book — written and drawn by Miller with colors by his then-wife Lynn Varley — creates an operatic, epic staging for the story of Thermopylae. Images are not rendered in strictly realistic ways, and in fact, Miller knowingly stripped down elements like the Spartans’ traditional military uniforms to make their faces and bodies more visible and athletic. It is an idealized view of a heroic act, a fictionalized retelling of the battle, and an effort to add to the legend of the 300 Spartans for modern audiences.

In adapting the comic nearly a decade after its publication, Snyder and his team sought to retain that legendary feeling for the feature film. Snyder’s visuals — including heightened color schemes, slow-motion, and exaggerated physicality — directly evoke Miller’s comic, and the legend reaches an even wider audience through the film. Again, it’s not entirely historically accurate, and it certainly doesn’t depict a humanistic view of history when it comes to the Persians, but the adaptation, like the comic, is striking and lasting.

300 airs this month on SYFY. Check the Schedule for listings.