The Brothers Grimm Meet Tarantino In AfterShock’s ‘Tales Of Mother F. Goose’ One Shot

by Olly MacNamee

Following on from AfterShock Comics’ ‘Little Red Hood‘, to feature in October’s AfterDark anthology, writer Frank Tieri , artist Joe Eisma, colourist Matt Herms and letterer Carlos M. Mangual are expanding this idea of a more gangster Grimms’ fairy tales with Tales of Mother F. Goose one shot.

“The Three Little Pigs are gluttonous casino owners. Little Miss Muffet is a hard-nosed cop with arachnophobia. The Three Blind Mice are ocularly impaired assassins. Puss in Boots is a feline-faced scumbag.

Welcome to MOTHER F. GOOSE, where your favorite fairy tales are turned into twisted characters right out of a Tarantino movie. Picking up from “LITTLE RED HOOD” (SHOCK) and “ALONG CAME A SPIDER” (AFTERDARK), we will make you a promise: this is the book that will ruin your childhood. Sorry, kids!”

Incentive Cover: Amanda Conner w/ Paul Mounts

Not content with just the synopsis and preview pages, writer Tieri drills down to give us more on Little Red Hood and the stories featured his new one shot:

“Basically both these projects expand on the world we set up in LITTLE RED HOOD — and they do it through the mob boss who is essentially the glue that holds all this shit together, Don Francesco Orca, our Mother F. Goose. (Orca means Goose in Italian. And yeah, his name is Francesco. What did ya think the F stood for? ;))

Orca was introduced in LITTLE RED HOOD where we saw he was the major player in this world and has his fingers in everything. This plays into TALES OF MOTHER F. GOOSE where there’s a murder– local pimp Georgie Porgie– who was apparently going to drop a dime on Orca. Detective Jack Horner and his partner, a certain Miss Muffet, have nabbed a number of suspects and through their interrogation we get our MFG versions of the tales of Puss-in-Boots, The Three Little Pigs, and Three Blind Mice. It’s actually a bit of a murder mystery as we find all these suspects have ties to Orca and it’s a question of who actually has the deepest ties of all and did the deed.

The ALONG CAME A SPIDER story in AFTERDARK, which hits stands in October, will act as a quasi-prelude to TALES OF MOTHER F. GOOSE. Here we find the aforementioned Muffet as she tracks down a serial killer known as the Spider. This is essentially Muffet’s origin story and we’ll see how and why she gets the tattoo she’s later sporting in MFG. It’s also a horror story and a rather disturbing one, especially if you’re a bit skeeved by spiders (and who isn’t?).”

As for the inspirations? Well, some of then are reflected in the homage covers accompanying this book. But here’s Tieri again with more:

“Here’s the thing– we didn’t set out to do any of this. Believe me, it’s not like I woke up one day and said I’m going to do fucked up versions of children’s fairy tales and ruin some childhoods, ya know? LOL

So, this all actually started when I was asked to do a short story for AfterShock’s SHOCK anthology. I decided to do a take on Little Red Riding Hood called LITTLE RED HOOD, sort of treating it like it was as if a guy like Quentin Tarantino or a Martin Scorsese or a Brian De Palma was telling the story. So with that in mind, in that version Red is a drug courier, Granny is a drug dealer and the Wolf was a rival drug dealer. Of note you’ll notice Wolf is not an actual wolf. That’s one of the main rules I set in with these stories– everything is street level. There’s no magic, nothing supernatural… and yeah, especially no talking animals. Characters may bear characteristics of said animal but every character in these stories are human. Human scumbags in many cases, but human nonetheless.

Anyway, our story of human scumbags proved to be one of the more popular ones in the anthology and Aftershock came to me and said, hey why not do more? Why not do other stories based in this universe we’ve created here? And thus… TALES OF MOTHER F. GOOSE was born.”