First things first: 300 is a sumptuous visual feast that hits all the right notes — action, drama, action, emotion, action, subtle relevance, and, more action — with Zack Snyder paying beautiful homage to Frank Miller’s source material. I saw it on IMAX this afternoon and was blown away, as was my wife, my buddy Dan and his wife, and the girl next to me who was bawling at the end.

Where Robert Rodriguez translated Miller’s work onto the screen literally with Sin City, to good effect, Snyder instead does so tonally, having the self-confidence to embellish where necessary and ends up with a far-superior adaptation that manages to pull off the unusual feat of being better than the book it was based on. Miller-bashers may not think that too difficult a feat, but I think his graphic novel is a similarly impressive piece of work, though more so for its visual style than its admittedly thin storyline. This, of course, is thanks as much to Lynn Varley’s color work as anything else, and I was glad to see her receive a co-credit on the film.

Regardless of what you or I or any other reviewer may think, though, 300 has inarguably skyrocketed both Frank Miller and Zack Snyder’s creative capital in Hollywood. Doubt it? Just check out its estimated take at the box office on Friday of $27,800,000.

Typically, aggressively marketed and reasonably well-reviewed movies like this peak on Saturday, and then drop 5-10% on Sunday, meaning 300’s opening weekend should come in well over $70m, possibly breaking $80m, which would put it just outside the Top 10 best opening weekends ever, sandwiched between the likes of Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones, The Da Vinci Code, and Austin Powers in Goldmember.

Think about that for a second.

All three of those movies were high-profile sequels or adaptations, featuring well-known actors and/or characters, and each went on to gross more than $200m at the domestic box office. 300, meanwhile, stars and is directed by people without a single box office track record worth noting, in a genre that’s seen its fair share of high-profile bombs over the past couple of years; plus, it’s based on a non-superhero comic book by a moderately famous creator best known for his gritty noirish work on Batman and Sin City.

At a minimum, its opening weekend is a triumph for its marketing campaign, fully covering its $60m production budget (and probably the marketing budget, too) and positioning it to be a hugely profitable venture for Warner Brothers, which is in desperate need of a few big hits in the wake of a lackluster 2006 that saw only four movies break the $100m barrier and included a few high-profile bombs like Poseidon, Lady in the Water, The Ant Bully and Wicker Man, not to mention the disappointing Superman Returns.

Dark Horse, publishers of the gorgeous hardcover the movie is based on — as well as his Sin City library — should be sitting pretty right now, too, and any bookstore that doesn’t have a Frank Miller endcap set up and an ad in their local paper advertising his backlist simply doesn’t like money. (Really smart retailers should also have an Ed Brubaker endcap set up, too.)

And therein lies a major opportunity for Diamond Comics Distributors to act like a leader instead of a parasite and support the market it has such a monopolistic death grip on.

With the Hollywood successes of 300 and Ghost Rider (poised to break $100m this weekend); a summer full of high-profile comic book movies on the horizon; the mainstream acclaim graphic novels like Fun Home and American Born Chinese have received recently; and the over-the-top coverage of the death of Captain America last week — Diamond should be spearheading an aggressive marketing campaign in support of their suppliers and retailers to drive customers into comics shops across the country. And I’m not talking about Free Comic Book Day, either.

I’m talking about something big.

Because everyone talks about the mythical “gateway comic”, the industry’s “killer app” equivalent that will send the masses into their local comic book shops in droves where they will then become regular customers and all live happily ever after; but, of course, it doesn’t work like that. There is no ONE book to rule them all. The key, rather, is MANY books to rule many DIFFERENT people, and at no point in the history of the comics industry has there ever been such a wide variety of quality material for a wide variety of tastes.

Only problem is, most people don’t know that until a movie like 300 (or V for Vendetta, or Sin City, or Hellboy, or Ghost World) comes along, and when they go to a mainstream bookstore all they see is a ton of manga, some superhero TPBs and a handful of other stuff. If they’re lucky enough to live near and be aware of a comics shop, they’re even worse off as most focus strictly on the superheroes because the risk is too high to invest in books no one’s ever heard of because their publishers have no marketing budgets and their distributor isn’t interested in broadening their revenue base.

Like a Bizarro version of 300, the gateway to comics is barricaded not by noble warriors defending their way of life, but by clueless bureaucrats who can’t see the forest for the trees.