One More Tarantino Story

Earlier this week Sony pictures announced the details of the home video release of Quentin Tarantino‘s “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood”, and that one of the editions will feature a bunch of extras including a 24 page “Mini MAD” magazine with a follow up parody of the fictional “Bounty Law” TV show from the film. How did that all come about? I’m glad you asked!

Back in late July MAD art director Suzy Hutchinson got a call from Quentin’s production team who wanted to explore the idea of doing a small MAD insert of some kind for the film’s Blu-ray release. It would be DVD booklet sized and probably about 5 pages or so. Suzy contacted myself and writer Andrew Secunda to see if we were interested in having another go at “Bounty Law” in a special project format. It turns out we both like work, so we were on board.

The project really came together around mid-August. It turned out Quentin “really loved” the idea, and when Quentin Tarantino “really loves” an idea that idea usually gets done. The booklet went from five pages to twenty four, and became a full blown “Mini MAD“. The staff at MAD and DC would put together and print the entire booklet, and deliver the finished project to Sony for inserting into one of the Blu-ray editions of the film.

Andrew, Suzy and I had a conference call and a lot of email exchanges trying to figure out how to approach the parody. We pitched several cover concepts to Quentin’s team and they liked the “draw” gag. Twenty four mini pages works out to about seven regular parody pages in terms of panels and storytelling, Andrew delivered a fun script that has a nod to classic MAD stories like “The Lone Stranger” and “Batboy and Rubin”, and I got a second shot at the “craft tint” 60’s era art look and feel. I think I got the effect down much better this time, even down to the “washy” look you would get with the chemicals, and a touch of the quick, almost sloppy touches you’d see here and there…

The end result turned out great. A LOT of credit has to go to Suzy and the art team at MAD, who managed to lay out a seven page parody into twenty four 5.25 x 6.75 inch pages and still keep the feel of a real issue of MAD, complete with marginals, etc. The booklet also has three reprinted classic advertising parodies, and like the one in MAD #9 they duplicated an aged look to the page and ink colors.

Unfortunately I can’t share any more of the art here right now, but maybe sometime in the near future. I have also had a number of people write to ask if I have any of the booklets available to sell them so they don’t have to dish out $65 for the “Collector’s Edition” of the film. I did get a handful of copies, but I’m not going to sell any of them. I didn’t get that many, and besides that kind of defeats the purpose of having an “exclusive” like this in a collectors edition of the movie. Sorry about that, but there is always eBay!