Review by C.J. Bunce
At first a love letter to Quentin Tarantino may sound a bit odd. He’s only made nine movies and said he was retired from directing and writing movies before, and yet he’s established himself as a singular success story in cinema. Watch the brilliant El Rey series The Director’s Chair, reviewed here at borg, and you’ll get some insight into how much of a genius and historian of movies Tarantino really is. The TV series featured director Robert Rodriguez interviewing key movie directors, including Tarantino, and fans of the auteur will find the next best thing in a new biographical graphic novel from Titan Comics. The oddly named Quentin by Tarantino is a story by French fan and writer-artist Améziane Hammouche aka Amazing Améziane, and it’s in stores this week in its first English translation (available at comic shops and here at Amazon).
In Quentin by Tarantino the author uses interviews and personal research to create a mock interview with Tarantino chronicling his life from the very beginning through Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Why not just interview Tarantino? Who knows. But the references and quotes all seem legitimate and woven into a fun ride with excellent imagery for fans of the man and his movies. It’s sort of a souvenir book for all his movies, while including the good and bad from behind the scenes.
Even the cover is brilliant, hiding 47 items from Tarantino’s career (there’s a key at the back of the book). The only problem is attribution. You won’t know how much of the book is real and how much is derived from the author’s imagination. The bibliography in the back doesn’t contain everything in the book, so you’ll want to verify the information independently if you ever want to quote anything from Quentin by Tarantino. Some of the controversial information can be found in a string of New York Times pieces, like his #MeToo and Uma Thurman car wreck apologies and regrets about work with Harvey Weinstein (all but one of his directed films came through Weinstein’s MiraMax studio). Footnotes would have been a good addition, propelling this into more academic territory–it’s almost that well done. So without that, take it all with a grain of salt. It’s still a compelling ride.
The book is full of fandom. And it’s a trip through Tarantino’s life. First Tarantino was introduced to movies, then comics, then movie novelizations, then crime novels, then working at a movie theater, then working at a movie rental store, then he took acting lessons from the actor behind Rosco P. Coltrane in The Dukes of Hazzard, then writing a phone book sized script for True Romance, then forging a friendship with director Tony Scott, leveraging money from an appearance on Golden Girls, and then he was In, making deals seemingly overnight with Hollywood’s elite.
Ameziane uses many illustration styles in this book, many emulating or all-out homages to famous comic book projects, book covers, and posters and artists of decades’ past. These images don’t begin to draw a picture of what is inside this book, but here is a peek from the publisher:
Not to be missed for fans of the man or his movies, the English edition of Quentin by Tarantino is in stores this week. Add it to your pull list at Elite Comics, your local comic shop, or order a copy here at Amazon.
