Tarentino's one of the best kinds of comic geeks. He reads them and loves them but he'll never let them take over his life (Kevin Smith once talked to him to get him to write a comic book but unfortunately they don't pay their writers enough to warrent his time). The filmmaker's comic references, like many of his references, are deeply ingrained into the story. For example in Resevoir Dogs, Mr. Orange's line, when describing, Joe Cabot as "the Thing. [He] looks just like the Thing." or in True Romance the fact that Clarence Worley is a comic book clerk.
Tarentino's biggest influence for his post modern masterpiece (for those who actually went to a real school, post modernism is the concept of examining past trends in new contexts, of creating intertextual relationships where two seperate pieces of work speak to each other) was the kung fu films of the sixties and seventies. Another influence was anime and manga (which were influenced by the same films). I'm not going to go too far into this because I believe that Whitney's article covered it well enough.
The angle that I'll take is that Kill Bill gives comics and cartoons a real chance to bust on onto the bigger scene. From the anime adventures of Kenshin or Ninja Scroll but also the manga like Lone Wolf and Cub (as was Road to Perdition). In this era, a filmmaker or songwriter or author or anyone can really can produce something that is reflective of other material. Now is a time when we can work our comic lexicon into the mainstream pop culture.
So go out, and slip little comic references into your conversations. People will think you're edgy and cool.
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