Xerxes: The Fall of the House of Darius and the Rise of Alexander

I guess you could call this a sequel to 300, but it came out in 2018, which was 20 years later, and doesn’t have much to do with the events of Thermopylae, which it skips in its race through over 150 years of Persian history. There’s also no real connection to the movie 300: Rise of an Empire, which actually had come out four years earlier.

The treatment of history is weaker than in 300 too. The “House of Darius” would be the Achaeminids, wouldn’t it? Or that’s what Darius I would have claimed. But I would have thought that would be the House of Cyrus, if anyone. The jeweled bodysuits of Xerxes and other Persian emperors was, and remains, mystifying to me. I was rolling my eyes a lot at some of the architecture and statuary, like the colossi on the Athenian acropolis. Aeskylos (Aeschylus) is reimagined as a cross between Darth Maul and a ninja. And Alexander the Great, when he shows up, is basically the reincarnation not of Hercules but Leonidas (because beards are manly). It all seemed a lot sillier than the earlier book. And the art felt lazier too. More full-page splashes (a good word for the splatter effect being used so often), with a few great sequences (the imagined deaths of Xerxes) and some very uninspired and pointless ones (the Ethiopian archers). Given the minimal and disjunctive text, it felt like a bunch of posters with big titles: Marathon! Xerxes Assassinated! Gaugamela! I’ve added the exclamation marks but they feel like they should be there.

300 managed to be an original and quite effective retelling of a particular historical incident. This book covers vastly more ground (both in time and space) and ends up just being a bunch of odd pictures. As I’ve said, some of them are great but most are just more of the same and I came away feeling that none of it added up to much.

Graphicalex