Miller and his longtime colorist and art assistant Lynn Varley told their tale in the late '90s, but it's back in circulation in a big way thanks to the film adaptation opening this weekend. The book itself is surprisingly small in terms of story; whereas Sin City had too many plots to cram into one movie, 300's storyline will need to be stretched with an hour's worth of combat or so.
The book is also a singular graphic achievement. It's a huge, horizontal album, with massive two-page spreads giving the story a widescreen, cinematic feel It's a comic that pretty much adapts itself into a movie in your head while you're reading.
The hero is Spartan King Leonidas. When he's told that he can't go to war during a religious festival, he instead goes for a walk with his personal bodyguard of 300 soldiers, and they just so happen to head in the direction of the Persian army.
The politics of the book make it a perfect, if inelegant and occasionally uncomfortable, allegory for our current War on Terror era, with the free men of Greece fighting a religious fanatic from what is now Iran. If anything, it seems more relevant today then it was when originally drawn.
But at the risk of sounding like a boy-loving Athenian weakling, I'd like to point out that in all present and near-future wars, the U.S. would and will seem to have more in common with Xerxes' Persia than Leonidas' Sparta. After all, when it comes to soldiers, money and technology, we're hardly the underdog, and we're fighting in other peoples' lands, not repelling invaders from our own.
Inubaka: Crazy For Dogs Vol. 1
Viz Media
Almost as if to prove there's a manga series covering every conceivable topic of interest comes Inubaka, a rom-com set in a Tokyo pet store.
I think the title literally translates into "dog-stupid," but the subtitle and references within the book make it sound more like "dog-crazy." But then, the only Japanese I know is what I've gleaned from manga and anime, and whether it's stupid or crazy, it would seem to apply to 18-year-old Suguri in either case.
She and her mutt Lupin are on their way to Tokyo when they meet handsome 26-year-old Teppei and his purebred dog at a highway rest stop. Both in heat and neither fixed nor spayed, the two dogs hit it off embarrassingly well. With their dog-driven meet-cute out of the way, Suguri ends up living at Teppei's place and working in his pet store Woofles, caring for the puppies there.
Artist Yukiya Sakuragi's storytelling is pretty standard—although there are more dog pee and dog poop jokes than most other manga, for obvious reasons—but the art is well worth a look.
Sakuragi's human characters are all abstracted and stripped down in their designs, but the dogs themselves are rendered photo-realistically, so that the cuteness of the various puppies is that of real puppies, rather than the exaggerated cartooniness usually associated with Japanese pop art.