Quentin Tarantino's 'Django' comic book sequel, featuring Zorro, has our attention

Dynamite and DC Entertainment, two comic book publishers, announced that they’re collaborating on a Django/Zorro crossover series, co-plotted by Quentin Tarantino and following the events of Django Unchained.

Matt Wagner, who wrote the comic book series Zorro (2008-2010) and Zorro Rides Again (2011-2012), will be co-plotting the story and coming up with the final script. “I’m very very excited about both this story and the opportunity to work with Matt,” Tarantino said in the press release. “It was reading his Zorro stories that convinced me what a good idea it was to join these two icons together.”

Soon after Django Unchained was released in theaters in 2012, Vertigo, an imprint of DC, produced a comic book series adapting the movie’s screenplay (including scenes that didn’t make the final cut), but Tarantino wasn’t directly involved with the project. Tarantino’s movies are famously stylized, often using visual and storytelling cues taken from comic books — but this will mark Tarantino’s first foray into comics themselves.

Zorro, a character who’s appeared in comics, television, movies, and other media since his debut in 1919, is a masked vigilante outlaw who’s really a Spanish nobleman living in California. Django Unchained mostly took place in 1858, at which point California was a free state—meaning the character might not have the chance to massacre too many slaveowners after going west. One potential storyline is the nationally controversial 1858 Archy Lee case, in which Lee, a slave from Mississippi, defended himself as a free man when his master took him on a trip to California.

Django/Zorro is set to be released in the second half of 2014. Tarantino is also reportedly preparing The Hateful Eight, a western film, with a script he revised after an earlier draft was leaked to the public. He’s also suing Gawker Media for allegedly leaking and promoting the draft.