Django Unchained

This graphic novel amounts to a highly visual narrative abridgment of the first draft of Tarantino’s Oscar-winning screenplay for last year’s film. As Tarantino notes in his introduction, anything he had to excise in the process of putting his story on the big screen has made its way into the graphic novel. The story, set two years before the advent of the Civil War, brings together a slave named Django and Dr. King Schulz, a German bounty hunter, who happens to be in hot pursuit of Django’s former owners. With the honesty and brutality that we’ve come to expect from Tarantino, the story examines the relationship between these unlikely partners, and terrifyingly illuminates one of the darkest eras in American history. Despite adding much new material, this graphic adaptation is pitch-perfect, and the illustrations are gorgeous, despite their brutality. Although Tarantino is often thought of as a filmmaker who forces horrifying clarity on viewers, as this graphic novel reminds us, often what he chooses not to show us is even worse. (Nov.)