From 1807 to 1822 Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, a pair of brothers with an interest in linguistics, collected and recorded over two hundred stories and folk tales from their native land of Germany.  In 1812 their first volume, Children’s and Household Tales, was published, introducing what would be some of the most famous stories of all time including Snow White, Rumpelstiltskin, Rupunzel, Hansel and Gretel, Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, Tom Thumb, the Elves and the Shoemaker and others to numerous to name.  Despite the fact that these tales were often dark and gruesome in nature, and often served as warnings to frighten children into good behaviour, over the centuries the Brother Grimm’s fairy tales have often been dismissed as children’s tales and bed time stories and through their popularization at the hands of  Walt Disney, have been stripped of their darkness, their sexual overtones and everything that made Grimm’s Fairy Tales interesting.

Nearly two hundred years later, in 2005, Philadelphia based writers Ralph Tedesco and Joe Tyler have taken these stories that have entertained generations of young and old alike and have put the sex and horror back into them.  Absolute new comers to the comic book industry, Ralph and Joe released their first issue of Grimm Fairy Tales, a horror anthology reenvisioning history’s greatest children’s stories with a gruesome twist, through their own independent company, Zenescope Entertainment in 2005.  Filling their books full of dark imagery, eroticism and a little bit of cheesecake, Ralph and Joe even manage to give a “moral to the story” at the end of each issue, much in the same spirit as the Brother Grimm did two centuries previously.  Focusing on the mysterious Sela, and her evil counterpart Belinda, Grimm Fairy Tales is not a book for children, but a dark, gritty, yet entertaining read for horror and fantasy fans.

I first discovered Zenescope's line of comics in 2007 when Joe and Ralph, along with writer Raven Gregory released Grimm Fairy Tales’ first spin off mini-series, Return to Wonderland, featuring Lewis Carroll’s famous characters in the same dark and erotic manner as Zenescope's cornerstone book.  Despite the fact that Alice in Wonderland has undergone such treatments before, Return to Wonderland had an absolute fresh approach to the Alice story, and by focusing on her daughter Callie’s journey through a darker and more disturbing Wonderland, Zenescope Entertainment caught my attention making them my favorite independent publisher in comics.  By the end of the year I wasn’t just buying Wonderland and Grimm, but everything that Zenescope Entertainment was releasing! 

In an industry that is competitive and difficult to survive in, Ralph Tedesco and Joe Tyler have managed to give Zenescope Entertainment and their books a definitive place on the comic industry’s map.  With a cult following of devoted readers, Joe and Ralph have increased their stable of writers and artists, and have released a number of other projects for 2008, including a second Wonderland series called Beyond Wonderland, another Grimm sequel called The Piper about the Pied Piper of Hamelin and a new Sinbad book titled 1001 Arabian Nights.  Zenescope Entertainment has been hitting a raw nerve with comic book fans, and returning these tales to these beloved dark and bloody roots.

Contacting them through their web-site at www.zenescope.com, Ralph and Joe agreed to talk to me about their books and upcoming projects.  We talked about the difficulties of starting in the comic industry as an independent press, the origins of their books and their ideas, as well as what is yet to come.  So come and take a walk along a darker path through the woods upon our pop culture journey, and try to ignore the big bad wolf that lurks in the bushes as PCA is proud to talk to the men who are continuing in Joseph and Wilhelm Grimm’s footsteps as

CONFESSSIONS OF A POP CULTURE ADDICT PRESENTS

THE NEW BROTHERS GRIMM: 

A CONVERSATION WITH ZENESCOPE ENTERTAINMENT’S RALPH TEDESCO AND JOE TYLER

I talked to Ralph Tedesco and Joe Tyler from their offices in Philadelphia via telephone in May 2008.

Sam:  Well I’ve just spent the morning going through a bunch of your books, trying to refresh my memory and get myself back up to speed.  I read most of the first Grimm Fairy Tales trade paperback and the first two issues of The Piper.  As I said earlier to you guys in my e-mails, I am buying all of your books right now and Zenescope has become one of my favorite independent presses.  You guys are doing great work.

Ralph:  Cool.  We really appreciate that.

Joe:  Yeah.  Thanks a lot.

Sam:  So have you guys always been comic book guys and interested in this business, and if you were what is your personal roots with comic books?

Ralph:  Well for me I was not somebody who followed comic book fanatically growing up.  Here and there I would read X-Men but it was never a real passion for me.  It has more so now that we’ve started the company.  Where as Joe's story is a lot different then mine.  He was a much bigger fan then I was and I didn’t realize how awesome they were until later in life. 

Joe:  Yeah.  I was definatly a huge comic book fan growing up in my early teens and then when the whole 90s thing fell out I kind of got out of it at that point and started coming back and rereading them as an adult.  We were both screen writers and that’s how we started the company.  We wanted to turn our screenplays into comics and then turn them into movies.  We didn’t have a lot of success out there with our screenplays as they were.  There is a lot of good stuff out there that I’ve gotten into since.  I don’t read too much superhero stuff but Preacher and The Walking Dead are some of my favorites.

Sam:  Preacher is probably my favorite title of all time.

Ralph:  Yeah.  Preacher is the one that I started reading a while back when Joe started reading it and it’s so addictive.  Now I’m into The Walking Dead too.  That’s such a great comic.  I was reading Hellblazer for a little bit.  I’ve become much more of a fan now being in the industry.  I don’t know much about the superhero comics I’m ashamed to say but I just don’t.  Joe probably has a broader spectrum.

Joe:  I was a huge Marvel fan growing up.  It just seems that there is just so much out there now with Spiderman and X-Men that I just wouldn’t know where to start.  I don’t know.  Perhaps its just not mature enough storylines or I’ve had enough of superheroes or what.  I’m more into the Vertigo stuff.

Sam:  Well you can see a lot of the Vertigo style of storytelling in the books you guys are doing.  That dark/horror/gothic/anthology type stories.

Joe:  Yeah, we definatly focus our books on adult readers and stay away from superheroes and go with the sci-fi/fantasy/horror genres.

Sam:  So how did you guys meet and start writing together?

Ralph:  I found Joe on the street and… (laughs)

Joe:  Reading comics…. (Laughs)

Ralph: …and I felt bad for him. Naw.  We grew up together.  I met him when we were teenagers.  He was dating my friend’s sister and then they ended up getting married.  I don’t know what she was thinking. (Laughs)  We started writing together and we were really big film buffs.  Joe was a screenwriter on the side and I was a screenwriter and doing some acting and we hooked up that way.  We wrote a couple of screenplays and filmed a couple of short films together.  That’s how we ended up evolving into doing this.

Sam:  Did you guys do anything I would have heard of?

Ralph:  Probably not.

Joe:  Other then our comics.

Ralph:  We’ve worked on a lot of stuff that hopefully you will here of though.  Acting wise maybe but none of our screenplays got sold unfortunately.  Not that we’ve written a ton of them but it was at a point where I was living out in LA and shopping some of the screenplays around that we had written and we had some things that looked promising but it never really got formulated so I moved back here and we started the company.

Sam:  As film buffs, what kind of thing do you guys into?

Ralph:  Well one of our favorite movies is Se7en with Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman.

Sam:  Yeah.  You guys are doing the Se7en comic.

Joe:  Yeah.  We’re doing the comic because we are such big fans.  That was huge for us.  We really run the gambit.  I’ve like everything from Braveheart to Swingers.  We’ve written a number of comedies together.  I love sci-fi and horror and fantasy stuff too.  I’m pretty well rounded in that area.  We wrote comedy a lot earlier but when we started the company we started writing a lot of more darker stuff.  It seemed to come naturally, especially when doing comic books.  The company’s tone just seemed to be going that way and think we fell into that pretty quickly and just sort of got comfortable writing that genre as well.

Sam:  Was Grimm Fairy Tales the first comic that you guys did together?

Joe:  Yeah.  That was it.

Sam:  How did that come together?  How did you guys come up with the idea and how did the book develop?

Ralph:  Well we were looking for something to do that would have a well recognized name.  Something with a license that we didn’t have to pay for and everybody knows fairy tales and I am big fan of the originals because they are very dark and a lot different from the Disney stuff so we decided to do a retelling of these classic fairy tales with a Twilight Zone twist.  We didn’t plan it with a lot of forethought to be honest.  We just started with it and it became a hit so we delved in it even further and tried to develop a mythology behind the main character, Sela, and then added more characters as we continued to do the series.  They would be reappearing while still trying to stay with the one shot kind of stories.

Joe:  We were both big fans of The Twilight Zone and Tales From the Dark Side.  They were just great shows to grow up on and I think we had that same idea.  Why can’t we just take that same concept and put it to fairy tales.  The original fairy tales were just so dark.  It just seemed to be a natural thing for us to explore.   We just hoped to be a blip on the radar and hoped that some people might be into this because we like it, and it turned out that people were so that’s a good thing.

Sam:  Your company has been pretty successful as an independent press.  How do you guys maintain that success and when did you guys realize that it was working out?

Joe:  It’s working out?  (Laughs)  I guess really when we launched the Return to Wonderland series last year.  It was a big eye opener for us because that was the book.  When we first put out Grimm Fairy Tales it didn’t sell all that well.  It was good for an independent book but right away, as you see with most independent comics, the numbers went down, down, down but they started to come back up.  For the first six or seven months I think we were wondering what we got ourselves into and then Grimm Fairy Tales did pick up, and then we came out with the Se7en book which did well from the start, and then when we launched Return to Wonderland it was a big hit.  At that point we knew we were onto something here.

Sam:  I discovered you guys when you put out Return to Wonderland.  That was the book that put you guys on my radar.

Ralph:  Yeah.  Grimm Fairy Tales hit a nerve and Return to Wonderland hit a bigger nerve and people just gravitated towards it and then Grimm’s numbers went up because of Wonderland and they just sort of played off of each other.

Joe:  We kind of started into this business knowing absolutely nothing.  We did a lot of market research and made a business plan an all of that but we’ve been kind of learning as we go and we made a lot of mistakes early on but now we’ve learned a lot and we’re doing a lot of things right as in ways of launching a series and promoting it.  The first year we did one or two shows and now we’re trying to do a dozen shows this year to just try to market our books and talk to the fans and see what they like.  Its definatly a huge learning curve for us.

Sam:  How difficult was it getting that first issue on the stands?

Joe:  Pretty difficult.

Ralph:  Yeah.  Knowing nothing, I mean, it was hard.  I think we got a “how to publish comics” book and we went off of that.  Finding artists is very very difficult.  Finding reliable artists I should say.  There are a lot of artists out there.  We went through about a half dozen artists on our first two books that we never got finished.  We had to get somebody to replace them. 

Joe:  I’ve got to say now though that we have so really awesome artists working for us. 

Ralph:  That again is part of that learning curb.  We’ve found guys that are a little more established and we can pay more for guys who have experience and who have proven themselves in the industry so it makes it a little bit easier. 

Sam:  So let’s talk about your characters for a bit.  Where did Sela come from?  She wasn’t even in the first issue.  What was your inspiration for the sexy crypt keeper type character?

Joe:  Well we had this idea for this Grimm Fairy Tales series and that we’d do it like Tales from the Crypt or The Twilight Zone or Tales From the Dark Side and then we wrote the first issue and then we when did the second issue we realized that we didn’t have that crypt keeper, or that mainstay, that was going to be in every book. 

Ralph:  We had the idea of the character, but it wasn’t fleshed out.

Joe:  And we already had production started in the first book so we decided to just add her in the second and we’d make her the mainstay of the series.

Sam:  And then, of course, you brought in Belinda as a counter character.  As her main foil.  How did she develop?

Ralph:   I think we became much more comfortable after the first few issues about where we wanted the storyline to go with Sela and the whole time we knew we needed a good nemesis for her and then we had to develop who the nemesis was going to be and what her powers would be and it took a little time to make it clear where we wanted it to go and by the time we finally fleshed out Belinda it was time to introduce her.  So it was kind of an ongoing process where as we were writing we were also developing these ideas of this other sub-plot/story that we wanted to flesh out.  We knew that we had to make it coherent and knew where we were going to be going with that story.

Joe:  And we definatly have an ending point in mind for this series but we want to tie all of our series – Return to Wonderland, Grimm Fairy Tales and a couple of other series that we have coming out like The Piper – that we’ve got this whole Grimm Universe that we need to tie together.  We got that planned out.

Ralph:  Belinda is a real fun character to write.  We just felt having the “ying and yang” Belinda and Sela relationship was fun to play with.  Now people are really digging that angle.

Sam:  Well I was quite horrified to see Sela get killed a few issues ago.  She’s not really dead – is she?

Joe:  (Laughs)

Ralph:  She is dead man.

Sam:  Okay…but you are bringing her back…right?

Ralph:  I dunno. (Laughs)

Joe:  We don’t know (Laughs).  I think it’d be safe to say that we haven’t seen the last of her.

Sam:  I will tell you that as a fan I really miss the character because I feel a sense of balance has been lost since Sela has been gone.

Joe:  Don’t lose all hope yet.

Sam:  Now what kind of criticisms have you gotten from parent groups or religious groups or decency groups about the violent and sexual nature of your comic?

Joe:  We really haven’t gotten a lot, but have gotten some complaints that we play up the cheesecake background to our books and some fans think that that’s all it is and we’ve taken a couple of hits on that but at the same time it definatly helps sell the book.

Sam:  It definatly does help sell the book.

Joe:  Yeah, and that’s the bottom line.

Ralph:  The thing is people do judge a book by a cover and we’re not showing nudity on our covers.  We’re not going over the top.  So if we do a sexy cover, sex sells.  But if people do give the book a chance the interiors are more toned down inside.  It’s not a sexual book.  We don’t show men and women having sex.  It’s not like that.  The book is totally different.  Just because the cover is a little bit sexy doesn’t mean that the book is just crap.    I guess it’s just a matter of people giving it a chance.  They should pick it up and check out the inside before they decide if it’s something that they don’t want to read.

Sam:  So you have Beyond Wonderland coming out, which is a spin off of the hugely successful Return to Wonderland.  Why do you think Wonderland took off the way it did?

Ralph:  Well I think it was a combination.  I think there is a lot more Alice in Wonderland fans out there then we thought there were and that a lot of people are really into the Lewis Carroll story and the movies and I think at that time we got some higher profile cover artists and our interior artist was probably the best that we had up to that time.  So it was a combination.  There is a reason that the Wonderland mythology has survived all these years.  It’s a great story that’s been around forever and its one of those things that people are interested in and I think just having a different spin on the mythology is great.  People could say “this is something I’m familiar with and that I grew up with but now here is a dark spin on it.  Let’s see how these guys pull it off.”  Now I am sure other people have done a Wonderland series that is dark but we tried to do it in a way that had not been done before and I feel that we hopefully succeeded in doing that.

Sam:  Well I’ve seen dark versions of Wonderland done before, but you guys managed to keep it fresh.

Joe:  Well that’s the key.  We try to do that, and then by bringing on Raven Gregory, who writes the series, we all kind of brainstormed for a long time before we put pen to paper on the series and came up with what we wanted to do and what we didn’t want to do and to stay away from those cliques as much as possible and to take it in a new direction, and what I loved from the beginning is that this is not a remake of Alice in Wonderland.  This is Alice’s daughter.  And by having Alice as a grown woman and having her be psychotic and that she haves a family now, and by exploring that whole family relationship, we were able to give  it an almost American Beauty feel to it, but adding that whole Wonderland element around it.  That was the key.  Developing the family, basing it in reality and then expanding upon it with the whole element of Wonderland.  I think we all felt that that was the key to the series. 

Sam:  Well that’s what worked for me.  And then there is The Piper.  Are you guys going to be bringing out any more spin off series like that?

Joe:  Yup.

Ralph:  Yeah.  We have a couple of more planned.

Sam:  Can you tell me more about the decision to do The Piper spin off?

Ralph:  Well we did the first story in Grimm, and we were actually in a pitch idea in LA and we were talking to a producer about using The Piper as a franchise character, and then we knew we had to do a spin off with this character.  He was just that good. 

Sam:  And you guys are bringing up the theme of school bullying.  Now once again, that can be a really cliqued topic.  How are you guys managing to keep that fresh.

Ralph:  Well, we brought Mike Kalvoda on, who was a good friend of mine when I was living out in LA, who is an up and coming screen writer out there.  He had written a few things for us before, including the Final Destination series that we had done, and he just wanted to put his own spin on that whole idea of how sometimes people will judge people because these shootings are occurring and how some students are so quick to judge students now because they’re scared if somebody looks a certain way that they could potentially end up shooting them.  It’s a scary thing that’s going on in schools and it becomes something like discrimination.  If the kid isn’t like everybody else he could be a school shooter.  It’s a delicate subject obviously but Mike was really adamant about wanting to touch on it a little bit and he sold us on the idea of doing that.

Sam:  And along with The Piper, you  just brought out 1001 Arabian Nights featuring the adventures of Sinbad.  Now originally I wasn’t very excited about this book but I bought it based on the strength of your other titles, but once I got it home I absolutely loved it!  It was better then I ever imagined it’d be!

Joe:  We’re getting a lot of that.  A lot of people thought it was going to be something else but it seems that people are really really getting into it already.  It’s a really cool concept.  We’re completely reinventing the Sinbad character.  We’re kind of upgrading him and making him more modern and Dan Wiklina, who is writing it, is just doing an awesome job.  If you like sword and sorcery fantasy stories with an edge you’ll like this.  It was a fun thing to create.  Sinbad is a character that is known for hundreds of years and has been in movies but we kind of wanted to reinvent the character into a kind of fun James Bond meets Captain Jack Sparrow .type.  We wanted to give a whole edgy feel to the character.  He’s a real smart ass, cracking one liners and gets all the women and he's kicking ass and taking names.

Ralph:  That’s what’s fun about this series, and Dan is doing an awesome job writing it.  He’s so good.

Sam:  So back to Grimm for a bit.  My favorite story that you did so far was the Hansel and Gretel story.  Has there been any stories that had a special meaning or that you connected with?  What was your personal favorite stories to do so far?

Ralph:  Mine was probably issue #5 – Sleeping Beauty.  It was a fun one to write.  I really liked writing the original Piper in issue #12 that inspired the spin off. 

Joe:  I liked Cinderella.

Ralph:  I thought you were going to say Rumpelstiltskin.

Joe:  Well it’s between Cinderella and Rumpelstiltskin and Jack and the Beanstalk.

Ralph:  And, we co-wrote it with Dan Wickline, but Three Blind Mice…that might be my new favorite.  That actually was one of the fun one to create and with Dan writing that with us, it was a great collaborative effort and I think it’s going to shock a lot of readers.

Sam:  What fairy tales are you guys going to be taking on in the upcoming months?

Ralph:  We have Three Blind Mice, The Ugly Duckling, a Pinocchio two parter.

Sam:  Okay, so sometimes I’m reading your books and you’ll write something, and putting some type of horrifying imagery in your books, and I’ll be looking at it thinking “Holy shit!  What the fuck!?  Where the hell are these guys coming up with this?”  One of the conclusions that really comes to mind is the end of Rapunzel.  Have one of you guys ever came up with an idea where you stopped dead in your tracks and thought “Jeez dude.  I’m sick.  I need some therapy.”

Ralph:  I do it all the time.  I wrote The Mad Hatter one shot and when I was editing it before it went to print, and I’m rereading it and I’m like “what the hell was I thinking?  There’s some sick stuff in here” and you look back and you think “where the hell did that come from?”  But then you realize why you did it and people have got it so far so you just keep going with it.  That’s at least how it is for me.  I don’t know how it is for Joe.

Joe:  No, I usually know why I’m sick.

Ralph:  You’re screwed up.

Joe:  I know.  I dunno.  Yeah, you do that.  Sometimes if I do have the chance to go back and read something that I wrote before I’m just like “what the hell?”  Sometimes something comes out of your head when you’re writing.  Sometimes you just get in a groove and you’re feeling it, so why second guess it.  Sometimes you just gotta go with where you think that story is going.

Sam:  Now how sick are you guys getting of being compared to Fables by Bill Willingham?

Joe:  I don’t think a lot of people compare them.  Fables is another great series that I read and I really like it but I think that it’s a lot different from ours.

Ralph:  Yeah, I think that some people assume, because it’s about fairy tales, that we are trying to be the next Fables but that’s not it at all.  I think it’s a completely different series.

Sam:  Have you ever met Bill Willingham?  Do you know if he’s ever read Grimm Fairy Tales?

Joe:  Actually we did meet Bill last year in Los Angeles and he bought the first couple of trades.  I was actually going to just give them to him for free but he said that he wanted to pay for them, which I thought was cool, and I told him I was a fan of the Fables series and he said that he had been hearing about our book for quite a while and finally wanted to check it out and see what it was all about.  A real nice guy.

Sam:  You said earlier that you see an ending to Grimm Fairy Tales.  How many issues are you look at before you cap it off?

Ralph:  Right now we are looking at 50 but we were thinking about 36 and decided to extend it to 50.  We definatly need to play it by ear.  We know where the series is going and we know how it’s going to end eventually but we just don’t know when it’s going to end.

Joe:  We have a couple of off-shoots to develop for the other spin offs were going to do.

Ralph:  We kind of went back and we knew that there was no way we we can fit it in 36 so we decided to think about 50 and now it’s like we’ll see.

Sam:  Besides the fairy tales, do you guys have any plans for other books?

Joe:  Yeah, we have quite a few new series that we’re going to launch either at the end of this year or the beginning of next year.

Ralph:  There’s one big project that we’re really excited about but I can’t give any information but we hope that it’ll be really big for us.

Joe:  We also have another semi-licensed property coming out which is The Straw Men based on the best selling book by an English author named Michael Marshall which will be out in June or July.  We are planning on doing some licensing here and there and continue to doing series as long as people are reading them.

Sam:  Any final thoughts?  Is there anything else you wanna let us know?

Ralph:  Yeah, people should check out MySpace Comics in June.

Joe:  Yeah, in June they’ll be putting up the first issue of Return to Wonderland back up there.  The hardcover will be out by then and the new series will be starting so MySpace will be running some of our stuff.

Sam:  And what shows are you going to be at this summer?

Ralph:  We’ll be in Chicago in June and San Diego in July.

Sam:  Alright, thanks guys.

So lemme tell you folks.  I read a lot of comic books, but I can’t recommend the books from Zenescope Comic enough.  Go down to your local comic book shop today and order a copy of one of their books, or check out Zenescope’s web-site at www.zenescope.com for discription of all of Zenescope's books from the past, present and peeks into the future,  as well as information in ordering their books directly from them.  You won’t be disappointed.  Zenescope Entertainment is putting out some of the best books in the comic book industry today.

And when you’re in Chicago or San Diego this summer don’t forget to stop at the Zenescope booth, purchase some swag, and say hi to Ralph, Joe and the good folks that put out Grimm Fairy Tales each month.  You can’t miss it.  It’s the one with the really hot chicks in fairy tale outfits in front of it.  I wonder if Joseph and Wilhelm Grimm had girls like that in their day.  If so, I bet they weren’t helping them sell their books.  I’ll tell ya…Ralph and Joe sure have it made.  The Grimm brothers would be jealous.

NOTE:  All images used for this interview are the property of Zenescope Entertainment and do not belong to Confessions of a Pop Culture Addict.