A Q-and-A with Ralph Tedesco

Doug Mann talks fairy tales and superheros with Ralph Tedesco, owner of comics company Zenescope.

Ralph Tedesco co-owns and writes for Zenescope, a comics company in Philadelphia which is known for its updating of classic fantasy/horror stories in titles such as Grimm Fairy Tales and Tales from Wonderland, along with adaptations of the TV show Charmed and the film Seven. A tall muscular man who better fits the stereotype of a cop on Cold Case or Law and Order than a comic book guy, Ralph and I discussed a wide range of comic-book related issues related to the titles he publishes.

RT: I’m Ralph Tedesco, and I am editor in chief of Zenescope Entertainment.

DM: Ralph, when did you start your company?

RT: Started the company in 2005, along with my business partner Joe Brusha.

DM: Is he here today?

RT: No, he didn’t make the trip down unfortunately.

DM: Where’s your company?

RT: We’re based out of Philadelphia.

DM: Is that where you grew up?

RT: It is. Grew up there, lived in Los Angeles for a few years, then moved back. I was doing this aspiring screenwriting thing out there, aspiring acting thing out there...

DM: Meet any famous people?

RT: Oh yeah, sure did. Some run-ins.

DM: What’s your first impression of LA, is it anything like it is in [movies]?

RT: It’s a love/hate relationship I have with Los Angeles. It’s different from the East coast. So it takes some getting used to, in some good ways and in some bad ways (laughs).

DM: I’ve been to Philadelphia years go, all I can remember about it is eating a hoagie there.

RT: Yeah, we’ve got good food.

DM: An obvious question, why did you start Zenescope? Other than the obvious money side of it?

RT: That’s a good question… the obvious money side of it (laughs). I don’t think we knew what we were getting into. I was all about storytelling as an aspiring screenwriter. I felt like I had some good stories to tell. I felt like I could continue to tell stories that people would want to read. I write only what I would want to read as a fan. I didn’t know a lot about comic book writing at all, really, I knew screenwriting…

DM: Did you see it as an extension of writing a script?

RT: Oh yeah, it’s very similar to writing a screenplay. I was a bit of a comic book fan, but I was not a huge comic book fan at the time, I’m ashamed to say it (laughs), but I grew into it. As I learned about the world, I really became a huge fan of the entire industry.

DM: And what was the first comic book you read as a kid? Do you remember? Or as a teenager?

RT: As a kid it was probably X-Men…

DM: What era was that, 80s?

RT: Yeah, it was 80s.

DM: With Claremont and Byrne?

RT: To be honest with you, I don’t even remember.

DM: What was the first comic that really had an effect on what you do now?

RT: Preacher. When I read that, I was blown away, because I didn’t realize that comics could be so dark. It just kind of flipped everything on its ear for me. And that’s when I started really getting into the medium a bit more.

DM: That’s Garth Ennis, right?

RT: Yeah.

DM: Can you tell a difference between the style and the darkness of the British, the Irish writers, and the American writers?

RT: Oh yeah. I was also a Constantine fan. And a big Hellblazer fan, it’s the same thing.

DM: Why do you think that is? Do you think the American writers self-censor?

RT: I don’t know… I surely don’t.

DM: No I know you don’t (laughter).

RT: I wish I knew. I think that we had the mentality of the superhero ingrained in our culture a little bit more.

DM: Do you think it’s a long-term effect of the code that sort of percolated down?

RT: It could be. It’s interesting that you bring that up, I’ve never really looked at it that way.

DM: Because the Code sort of died by the 90s, but maybe people were still thinking in those terms.

RT: Yeah, that’s a good point actually.

DM: And the Brits, I don’t think they really had a Code. They had censorship laws obviously… Anyway, what was the first story you wrote for Zenescope?

RT: The first thing we ever wrote was Grimm Fairly Tales #1.

DM: Do you know the title?

RT: It was Red Riding Hood.

DM: Is that why she’s here? [referring to a woman dressed up as “Red” at the booth with a basket of comics on her arm]

RT: That’s why Red Riding Hood is present today, along with Snow White. Snow White was our seventh issue. We started with Grimm Fairly Tales, then we did Seven, which is based on the David Fincher film. We did a prequel that sort of followed John Doe.

DM: I’ve seen the film, but I haven’t read your comic of it. Would you say that it’s darker or lighter than the film?

RT: Even darker surprisingly.

DM: Were Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt in that? Do the characters look like them?

RT: We don’t use them too much because it follows the John Doe character, which is Kevin Spacey, and it looks like him.

DM: I have read a bunch of the Grimm Fairly Tales, and two things: one, why adapt these old fairly tales? And two, you’re obviously making them sexier and maybe more violent, or is that not true?

RT: It’s true to an extent. Honestly, when we started the company, we just thought it was a neat idea that no one’s really explored enough of. A dark twist on things, fairy tales. They’re dark to begin with. So we decided, let’s go back to the originals, and see how dark they really are, and then put our own twist on them, to keep them dark and provocative and sexy. The sexiness factor’s honestly more [in] the cover art. The interiors can be a little bit sexy. The story lines…

DM: Al Rio does some covers?

RT: Yeah, Al Rio does a lot of covers. It’s definitely a balance. The sexy covers sell.

DM: Are the Rio covers really there to sell the book, or do they stand out on their own?

RT: Well, it helps them stand out, especially when we’re an independent, new company and no one knew who we were. We had to come out with that angle, that edginess and that sexiness. But we always knew that the stories would be… not anything but a dark twist on [the originals].

DM: I’m curious, did you study any psychology in college?

RT: Yeah, I did.

DM: It seems to me, maybe I’m reading too much into it, there’s a real Freudian edge to them.

RT: (Laughs) There is. We try to strike a balance in our writing. We try to kill two birds with one stone, so to speak.

DM: Are the Grimm Fairly Tales, at least the first few volumes, all adaptations of actual Grimms' Fairly Tales?

RT: Most of them are adaptations of actual ones. Almost all of them are. There’s some obscure fairy tales that we pull out. As the series progresses, Sela and Belinda, the main characters, kind of evolve, and their story line evolves, so it’s expanded so much and broadened so much that we don’t really have to have a real fairy tale tied into each story.

DM: I’m curious about the process, when you write say Rumpelstilksin or Red Riding Hood, or something like that, do you sit down and read the old story first?

RT: Yeah.

DM: And then you think about…

RT: … how to do the story.

DM: And many of your stories are set in contemporary settings. Is that just to make them more “relatable” to the reader?

RT: It’s part of the story, the entire realm. In our world there’s a fairy tale realm that is in a different time and place, but it’s linear to the real world. So you can travel between these dimensions.

DM: Are you setting up, at least sort of on the side, a Zenescopeverse, like there’s a Marvelverse and a DCverse?

RT: Yeah, here’s what we’re doing. There’s the Grimm Fairly Tales world, then we have the subdivisions, we have the Wonderland series, which takes place in the Grimm Fairly Tales universe, yet even though you read Wonderland, you really wouldn’t know that there’s a Grimm Fairly Tales universe. But in Grimm you’re starting to see everything start to come together in the characters, with issue 50 approaching, so there is definitely an inter-connection between these series. Like the Neverland series, which has to cross over too.

DM: What was the motivation behind bringing in Sela, the narrator, in? And Belinda’s the dark side?

RT: We knew we couldn’t just do a simple retelling of classic fairy tales without it being repetitive and getting [dull]. Sela is the official “crypt keeper” so to speak. She was going to be the narrator of everything. We want to expand on this world, and we created Sela, we thought “this is a really dynamic character”. Joe and I had these brainstorming sessions where we’d say “What kind of world could this be? What could we do with it?” And everything just rounded out from there. We knew we had to create Belinda as the dark part.

DM: So, do you know what Manicheanism is? Because it really strikes me… it’s an old philosophy that says, the universe is dominated by forces of good and evil which are constantly at war. Which is basically superheroes.

RT: That’s basically the idea behind everything.

DM: Your Wonderland series, were you a Lewis Carroll fan, did you read it at all?

RT: Yeah, I read it years ago. We always wanted to do a Wonderland series after we started Grimm, and we sat down with Raven Gregory, who wrote one of the series that Joe and I had an idea for. The big thing that Raven and I, and myself and Joe, wanted to do was not to create… a remake of Alice in Wonderland. We wanted to create a sequel, but to make it really dark.

DM: I remember reading one issue, I think it had the Mad Hatter as a sort of homicidal lunatic… was that meant to be satire? Or was that just pure horror?

RT: There’s definitely some satire involved, certainly. But it’s skewed more toward horror. There’s always that little element of satire.

DM: Was that your writing?

RT: That’s Raven Gregory, one of our staff writers.

DM: Did you see the Tim Burton film?

RT: I have not (laughs). I’ll get around to it.

DM: I wasn’t that impressed.

RT: I wanted them to make our version instead.

DM: I noticed you’ve done a little bit of science fiction, is that something new?

RT: No, we came up with the idea a couple of years ago. We wanted to do a scifi anthology, and we had some ideas. Because Joe and I are big scifi fans. It’s just a matter of spreading our wings a little bit further and seeing what audience we can tap into.

DM: Is there any possibility of Zenescope doing superheroes? Not that I’d want that.

RT: Very low possibility. It’s not really what we were looking to do. We’re not going to compete with Marvel and DC. It wouldn’t be worthwhile. All those superheroes have been done, it seems.

DM: You’re obviously a smaller press compared to Marvel and DC – what are one or two of the really big challenges, other than just getting money…

RT: Marvel and DC are what they are, you’re not going to compete with them, not at this point at least. So it’s really just setting yourself up as one of the top ten publishers on a consistent basis. After Marvel and DC you have the Booms, the IDWs, the Dynamites…

DM: Some of them come and go, though…

RT: Yeah, some of them come and go, and a lot of those guys do more licensed stuff than we do. We’re one of the few independents in the top ten that create our own IP, that generate our own intellectual property. That’s the one thing that we’re proud of that we do.

DM: One last question before I let you go. I talked earlier about you upping the violence-and-sex quotient in your books (which I have no objection to) – but you’re American, and I’m Canadian – I wonder what you think about the old Wertham controversy. Are there any limits to free expression in pop culture, is there any thing you couldn’t do in a horror book, short of libel laws and stuff like that?

RT: You’re asking me is there anything I personally wouldn’t do?

DM: That you couldn’t get away with in the [United] States. Or that you feel is just plain wrong. In Wonderland, you make the Mad Hatter…

RT: In Wonderland, the Mad Hatter is essentially a rapist, and one version of Mad Hatter’s a pedophile. Of course, we would never go so far as to show him raping somebody. There’s always a line. For me personally, you’ll never see anything overtly sexual or anything X-rated. It’s not something we’re into. I mean, we want to tell good stories, and if it makes sense that the character’s a rapist, or whatever the character is, a murderer, it’s what the character is. But we’re not setting out for shock value. We’re not trying to shock people into buying [the books]. As crazy as it gets, it’s the sexy covers [that attract people].

DM: Sexy covers, horror inside. So it’s a sex-horror sandwich.

RT: (Laughs) Pretty much.

DM: One last thing, do you think you’ll ever run out of fairy tales to tell?

RT: (Laughs) No.

DM: Thanks a lot.