Dave Franchini, Zenescope Entertainment Interview

Dave Franchini is comic book editor and writer who has been using his creative talents to expand the world of Zenescope Entertainment and it’s many fantasy adventure titles for over a decade. In this second of three behind the scenes interviews with the creators of such titles as Grimm Fairy Tales, Belle, and OZ: Return of the Wicked Witch, PopGeeks and WIZARDS The Podcast Guide To Comics are seeking to gain a better understanding of this unique comic book publisher.

Michael Canetti: So first start off, I’m a huge fan of your work. I have a ton of comics written by you. So I’ve got to start by saying that one of the characters that you’ve worked on in the Zenescope universe is Cinderella: Serial Killer. I love serial killers, so I’m excited about it. And I want to know where you came up with the idea to make her a serial killer.

Dave Franchini: When Joe [Brusha, President of Zenescope Entertainment] first introduced her during Grimm Fairy Tales number 2 she was a little quirky, a little crazy. Then they brought her back for like Grimm Fairy Tales number 45 and that’s when she became more sadistic. She was like making the sorority girls hold actual hearts and squeeze it over their heads, but she didn’t completely lose her mind yet. She was just evil and mean. Then Pat [Shand] kind of took her took her over in Cinderella: Age of Darkness and he made her a little bit more flakey, a little goofier and it just kind of kept evolving from there. We saw her in Robyn Hood: Apocalypse and that’s the last time you saw her for a while because, spoiler: she kills the four horsemen of the apocalypse and she gets incinerated.

Before I even really wrote, I started at Zenescope as an intern. Then I went into sales and then I kind of slowly edged my way into writing. I always loved Garth Ennis. I love Punisher Kills the Marvel Universe. I love that that craziness. I love Deadpool. I love like the Daniel Way Deadpool, that whole run where it was like Secret Invasion. 

So I pitched it to Joe, one of the owners, I was like, ‘What if we did one where Cindy goes around and just literally just murders everybody. I was like, ‘It’s not set in the real world and they’re not really getting murdered. It’s just, this is how we bring her back to life. Because Joe was already started planting seeds for this group called Tarot and I was like, ‘OK, so we can make it like they’re resurrecting her and this is what is flashing through her brain. It’s unlocking all her craziness that she wants to do, because she felt wronged at the end of Apocalypse. She knows she’s been dead. So it’s like she’s missing a piece of herself now.’ Because I guess you would be mentally scarred if you died in the Apocalypse. 

So that’s where that first arc came from, because I pitched it. And I didn’t write it, I was just pitching ideas. Then we had a writers meeting. Like a pitch meeting with me and a few other writers. and one of them was like, ‘Oh, what if you do it this way?’ And Joe’s like, ‘No, I don’t I don’t want to do it that way.’ And he’s like, “Why don’t YOU write it?’ and I was like, ‘Alright, cool.’ Then I just took it and ran with it. He gave me little pieces of an outline and said, ‘Let’s do it in four issues’. It gave me a good stepping stone.

Michael Cannetti: You went to Penn State to study technology.  How did a career in comics come from that, since you weren’t a creative writing major or anything like that?

Dave Franchini: I wrote my first comic book when I was like eight, with me and my grandma. I drew it. It was a Ninja Turtles comic and it was a Batman comic, two different comics, it was my own little fan fiction.  Apparently I couldn’t write neat enough, so she wrote what I wanted for me. We made my comic together and then I kind of fell out of it until high school. In 10th grade somebody gave me Watchmen and it was awesome. It got me hooked back into it. Then I started getting back into it and going to a comic book store for the first time. I actually I’ve never went to a comic book store before. I bought my first comics at Toys R Us, I got a 5-pack of Green Lantern. 

So I got into comics in high school and then we started going to Wizard World Philly Comic Con. I would just go there every year and get my free DC stuff, my free Marvel stuff and then the one year I went, I think it was my it was my senior year of college. I’m at Penn State and I’m getting a Bachelor’s in Computer Science. So I go to Comic Con and I’m just walking around. I heard about Zenescope, but not Zenescope. I just heard ‘Oh, there’s Grimm Fairy Tales.’ I love that type of stuff. I love horror. I love fairy tales, the stuff I grew up on. So I went over their their booth. And I wanted to buy Grimm Volume One, but they didn’t have it. So I bought Volume Two. Then I bought a Sinbad book off of them. I read the books. I thought, ‘These are cool’.

Then I went on their website and it was like, ‘Sinbad the next issue, click here.’ I was like, ’Oh, I want the next issue.” So I clicked it and it shifted and I accidentally clicked the MySpace link to their MySpace blog. It said “Internships Needed”. I was like, ‘Oh, sweet. I need an internship. Why not?’ I was like, ‘Do you guys have a computer internship there?’ And they were like, ‘E-mail Ralph Tedesco’. So I e-mail him and he’s like, ‘Yeah, our computer guy just became a cop!’ So I went out and bought a suit. I was like, ‘I’m not gonna get this anyway.’, but I remember that I come in, I sit on the couch in the office, there’s a case Miller Light in front of me. I thought, ‘That’s pretty cool’. Then I go in to meet Ralph and he laughs. He’s like, ‘I’m sorry, man. I should have told you. We’re pretty casual here.’ In my head, I’m like, ‘I just bought this suit, this sucks’ Then he called me back a week later and he got me a job there. 

So I started out as an intern for their computers and stuff like that. I set up a printer and I set up their network for all the computers and I was done. It was done in two days and I was like, ‘Crap I need to write 15 pages and I need to do so many hours worth of internship.’ So I stayed on, I just hopped in anywhere they needed me. In the warehouse, whatever they needed, I got it. And then I made up this 15 page paper off of like two things I’d done for them and I handed that in.

Then we went to Wizard World Philly. People are walking by I’m like, ‘Hey, have you read our books before? Hey, are you gonna check these out?’ It’s probably the same thing I’d be doing when I’m old and I have dementia in an old folks home. I’m gonna be the old man like, ‘Hey, have you read our books? (Laughs)

Adam Pope: You’ve talked a lot about Wizard World Philly. You’re saying it was  kind of the beginning for you. What was your relationship with Wizard magazine? Were you more about the convention or were you reading the magazine too? 

Dave Franchini: I’ve read two issues of it. I wasn’t super into comics. I liked reading what I read, but I wasn’t really into knowing who the writers and artists were. I just knew I liked books. And then I started getting to like,’ Oh, I like this character. I’m gonna read everything The Flash. I’m gonna read everything Green Lantern. I’m gonna read everything Spider-Man.’ It was more just like, ‘Give me something. I’ll read it.’ I have this issue of Spider-Man, the introduction of The Slug. It was like a knockoff of The Kingpin. It’s probably a terrible book, but I loved it. I didn’t care because it was just comics. I just wanted to read. I wasn’t so ingrained to where I’m like, ‘Oh, I gotta read this guy’s stuff.’ I was like, ‘I just want to read it all. Put it in front of me. I’m going to read it.’ So it was just the Comic Con itself, it was never really the magazine.

Adam Pope: What was your first assignment? How did you let them know, ‘Hey, I can write”?

Dave Franchini: I’m annoying. (Laughs) I was a super fan. So I did the Wizard World stuff and I was selling. They’re like, ‘We need someone in sales. Do you want to do sales?’ So I was in sales and and I remember Joe was like, “We’ll keep you in sales for a little bit and then we’ll move you into editing.’ Six years later is when I moved to editing. So I would just read everything they did. I’ve read everything’s Zenescope’s ever written, and things that you might not have ever seen. I loved the comics, I loved everything about it. 

They would always have damaged books every time we got shipments. And I’m like, ‘Can I buy thes off you?’ And their like, ‘You can just take ‘em. We’re gonna throw them out. So I go through them and I grabbed all the ones I wanted. Then I said, ‘Why don’t you just take these to the shows and sell for like $1? I would buy them’ And we did. And they’re our biggest sellers. You just see all the stuff as crap and people want to buy it. They just want the books. So I would basically read everything. Then after a while I started catching mistakes in the printed books. I wasn’t trying to be a jerk, but I’d write him an e-mail because I wouldn’t get up and say it to them. I’d write him an e-mail, like, ‘Hey, I found this in this book.’ They said, ‘We’ll fix it in the trade.” I just kept doing that.

So I’m doing sales for a couple of years. Our head of licensing. Jen Bermel, she, was getting our deal together with Discovery Channel. We already did Top 10 Deadliest Sharks and we were doing a follow up for Great White Sharks. And I was like, ‘Can I write one of them?’ And she said, ‘Yeah, sure.’ And then she told me to find a few different Great White stories and then I wrote one and it was eight pages long. So I just wrote it and gave it to her and then I didn’t think about it. They weren’t going to get started on it for months.

Then I was at San Diego Comic Con and Raven, who created Wonderland, he was our Executive Editor at a time. I was just kind of joking, but serious. I was like, ‘Yo, man. When you’re gonna let me write?’ He’s like, ‘You want to write an origin or something?’ I was like, ‘Yeah’ And he gave me the characters to pick from I was like, ‘How about the Goblin Queen? So he says, ‘Write up an outline for me for an issue and then get back to me.’ I was like, ‘Alright’. So I finished out San Diego and when I got home, I started writing the outline. I had the idea in the plane and then I wrote this crazy long outline. And then he said, ’It’s too long’, but then he gave me notes, he cut down some stuff. I gave it to him another time and he cut it down a little bit more. I gave it to him again and then turned it into a script. I never wrote one before. Raven gave me some notes and he filled in some things. So if you look at the first one it’s by me and Raven, because he threw in some stuff and he helped me.

It was 2013, so the Goblin Queen in the Grimm Universe number 3 and then the Great White story came out within like two weeks of each other. So it wound up happening at the same time. That was like my first time writing, I wound up getting a nonfiction and a fiction in the same exact same year.

Michael Canetti: I have every issue of Belle, because she’s a relatively new character in the universe and you’ve basically forged her from an idea, which I think is a great concept. I kind of look at her as sort of like an archetype of a young Batman or a young Nightwing or Batgirl. Did you model her character off of anything?

Dave Franchini: She started in a conversation with me and Joe. One day we’re just talking about we need to we need some stories coming up. We’re gonna do an Armed Forces one shot, we never did one before. I was like, ‘Should we do a short story for it?’ He’s like, ‘Yeah. Do you want to do one one?’ And at that time, I was writing all of our short stories. That’s how I was keeping myself writing. I got the Cinderella one in like 2016, but then I wasn’t fully writing after I wrote that. I was just doing short stories, little things here and there. Then I was like, ‘If it’s a new military character…’, I started getting an idea in my head and I was like, ‘I’ll write it up tonight and then I’ll bring it to you tomorrow.’ It was a five page story. Just an outline. Then he’s like, ‘Yeah, that’s cool. Let’s do that.

It was just about how she [Belle], through generations, on one side was military. Because of the armed forces that made me think that, ‘OK, let’s build on that somebody has a military background. Then I was like, ‘What if the other side of her is a beast in her house? So that way, it ties into the fairy tales.’ And it just evolved from there. I wrote the five page story and He’s like, ‘Let’s make it into a mini-series.’ And I was like, ‘OK. Can I write it?’ Again, he was like, ‘Alright, sweet.’ So I took the outline, I wrote it, and I sent it to him and and it started evolving. 

Then I read the Beauty and the Beast books. I read our versions, like a Grimm [Fairy Tales] issues 13 and 14, and I was like, ‘What can I take from that? Those kind of end differently, it doesn’t work.’ and decided, ’Let’s make this completely separate.’ Then I watched the new movie with Emma Watson and I watched the old cartoon, I just wanted to ingrain myself in what we knew of that and decide, ‘What can I take from this that people know?’ There was the coloring of the costume and that’s why the costume changes and the colors change, because they match that like that visual cue. It was just building it out from there. 

And it was like, ‘What would happen if the beasts are coming after her? Why is this happening? What’s going on?’ And then it just kind of just flew out of me. And I was still early in my writing, so not all of it was fleshed out. I remember at one point, it [The Beast] was not going to be her brother…

Michael Canetti: Which I love. I love that take that. It’s not a love interest. It’s so much more interesting. It’s really cool.

Dave Franchini: That was the first thing, ‘Should we make it a love interest?’ and I was like, ‘No. Let’s do it this way because it’s unexpected.’ So it just kept building off of that and then it was just like, ‘How messed up is this family?

And the whole character balance, it’s definitely like a Batman. But everything you write is kind of a piece of you. You get to write a little bit of what you know, and a little bit what you make up. So Belle, when I write her it’s more of my insecurities and the things I’m unsure of. What’s going happen? I don’t know. But I’m just going to take the chance and do it. And that’s the whole thing of my career. ‘Can I do this? Can I do that?’ Be pestering, but then also be sarcastic to cover up your insecurities. So she’s a little bit of Batman mixed with Spider-Man. Where he has the jokes to deflect them from thinking they’re getting to him. But in his head, he’s just like, ‘Oh, crap. I’m about to get impaled by the Rhino.’ So it was just taking those things that I liked and smashing them together. 

Michael Canetti: In a way it’s sort of kind of Buffy the Vampire Slayer in a sense, where there’s a legacy of of these people that were going after these monsters and she’s the next phase of that, so to speak. There’s a whole secret society, it’s a wild story. It’s fantastic. If you haven’t read it, the first volume of Belle is fantastic and everything since has always been very interesting. It does keep this youthful, Peter Parker mentality, but also not as brooding as a Batman, more like a Nightwing sort of a character, which I love. Adam doesn’t know as much about the Zenescope universe as I do…

Adam Pope: Yeah, that’s the thing. The first thing I’ve read is OZ: Return of the Wicked Witch. That’s my first introduction. We talked to David Wohl last time and he spoke very highly of you. Especially when you were mentioning how much research you do to pull in all those elements. That’s what he was telling us. He’s like, ‘Oh, Dave is so good at that. He’ll read every OZ book…”. So I want to ask about that real quick. What for you, what was the most exciting part of that collaboration between you and David Wohl on this most recent OZ project?

Dave Franchini: Just start with, I love working with David. It’s weird how easily we just click on everything we do. When we outline a lot of these stories together, it just literally flows. It’s really cool to have somebody where our ideas don’t smash into each other and push each other out of the way. It’s more like, ‘I like that idea. How about we do this with that idea? And then we do this…’ And we laugh, because every time we’re done with an outline, we’re like, “We really liked that one.’ And we say it every time and I’m like, ‘Yeah, because we’re obsessed with ourselves’ (laughs). 

Then it’s cool too, because I love The Darkness. I got into The Darkness and Witchblade [Edited and written by David Wohl at Top Cow Studios in the 90’s] back when I was dating this girl in high school and her dad gave me the The Darkness Compendium and then the Witchblade one, and I just got sucked into those. When we first started working together it was so cool to be working with someone that I have their books on my shelf. I was it was cool to be able to work with a guy that I read. The only time I ever had that feeling was when I worked with Chuck Dixon or with Howard Mackie and Terry Kavanaugh. It’s just crazy to be working with people who have been building things and inspiring you to write. But I don’t want to turn him off from wanting to work with me, being like, ‘Oh, remember when you did this?’ I didn’t want him to be like, “OK Dude, but let’s make something new’. So I love working with David, he is one of the most laid back and calm guys. He goes with every flow. And I tell him that all the time, ‘You just have this weirdly positive attitude that creeps me out’, because I’m neurotic. 

Michael Cannetti: So one of the things that I find so interesting, there’s the various realms in Zenescope, but also there are certain offshoots of things. And one of the best books that has come out in the last five years, is Man Goat and the Bunnyman. It’s basically, Man Goat who’s like a son of Satan or something like that and this humanoid bunny fellow. It’s the most insane three issue story that you’ve ever read in your life, but it’s super fun. Who came up with the idea for that?

Dave Franchini: We rented a house in like Brigantine, NJ right outside of Atlantic City because we like to drink and gamble. So we wanted to be close enough to do it, but only do it at night. So we’re going to lock ourselves in, Thursday to Sunday we’re going to do nothing but map out all of our collectible covers for the year. Then we’ll do story stuff. We’re mapping out stories and outlining everything. Then Saturday, we do that for half a day, then we go to the casino. That’s our reward. We don’t leave the house until that Saturday night. And then that Sunday, we do a little bit and then we go home. 

So with Man Goat and the Bunnyman, we’re sitting there and we’re doing this thing where every quarter we would do a three issue miniseries that was non-Grimm universe. No fairy tales, just something different to get new fans to see what it is and also to stretch our brains outside of the fairy tale realm. I had this idea like, ‘What if we did something like the man goat and the bunny man.’ And I remember we’re sitting there saying, ‘Well, what’s the idea?’ And someone is saying like, ‘Maybe they hunt other monsters…’ and I was like, ‘Alright, I like that.’ And we just started building on that like, ‘What if they did this? What if they did that?’ And then I remember we googled the picture and It looks like he’s pooping. I was like, ‘We should put that in there’…

Michael Cannetti: Yes! It’s so insane. It’s so funny.

Dave Franchini: It just makes me laugh. There’s a lot of poop jokes in there.

Michael Canetti: Yeah. The bunny gets nervous and poops himself. It’s really fun. 

Dave Franchini: Then and then a guy picks it up and he’s trying to track them. So it just kind of just spun out a bunch of us just making each other laugh. Because it wasn’t fully a comedy at first. And then we just started making it funny because we’re like this is crazy, Man Goat and Bunnyman. I think Joe definitely didn’t want it to be super serious. So we just started leaning into it and getting goofier and goofier with it. I remember we had these giant post-it notes where we would write the next thing and the next thing. We went through the whole first issue and then all sudden, it got to a point where I couldn’t even keep up with what we were writing. So Joe just put it on his laptop and he was just typing it as we went. We mapped out the whole three issue series in like a day and a half of just being goofy and weird. 

I still tell Joe and Ralph to this day. It just felt different. This was one of our favorite things that we’ve created. It’s really so different and it hits so many levels of things that I love. So I hoped other people loved it. That’s the thing, me, Joe and Ralph have that weird sense of humor. I’m definitely the weirdest one. They’ll remind me all the time because we all laugh at this very weird stuff. That’s all it was it was just building on this and cohesively making this crazy story. Then we did it again with the second one and David [Wohl] was included too, because David wasn’t in the company when we made the first one.

Adam Pope: This sounds like the next thing I need to check out, now that I’ve gotten past the world of OZ.

Michael Cannetti: That’s the funniest thing about it, they couldn’t keep this on the shelves. The comic shops would sell out of this book so fast that they kept having to order reprints because people wanted it. So this insane three issue story, people just couldn’t stop buying it and I was one of them. I like obscure stuff sometimes and this is really obscure.

Adam Pope: Yeah, I’m always looking for humor in my books. Now, obviously we’re on two different sides of this. Michael was drawn in by the covers…

Michael Canetti: I have to correct you on that. My first ever issue that I bought was was the first volume of Red Agent. It was a James Bond sort of cover and I was like, ‘This looks kind of cool.’ I opened it and it was a reimagining of Little Red Riding Hood as a spy. I was like, ‘Oh, okay and she’s got superpowers.’ And that was it. The covers kind of came second to that story. 

Adam Pope: Yeah, OK. So I’m curious to get your perspective, Dave, because for someone like me, that doesn’t realize what stories are actually in there, I see a certain cover or there may be the reputation of your place in the marketplace that’s out there. Do you think the racy cover idea helps or hinders your sales?

Dave Franchini: Even at conventions you see people and it’s funny, moms will cover their kids eyes as they walk by the booth and stuff like that. It’s tough. It’s a hard thing. The reason they did it in the beginning is because they needed something to catch the eye and be different from your normal superhero stuff. It couldn’t be like Fables, it couldn’t be like anything that was already existing and so that was the reason. It was like, ‘OK, the two sexy covers. They did it in the 90’s and we know where it went, but let’s bring it back. Let’s do this.’ And it worked. It’s a double edged sword. It got people to buy it and at the same time, it makes some people that just are so against that not want to pick it up. 

That’s one of my favorite things at conventions, is people walk by and want nothing to do with us and you just say, ‘Check them out. I’ll tell you about them real quick.’ And then the joke’s on them. You show them the art and show them how crazy it is. I used to show them Wonderland and how they would paint the roses. Because they decapitated the card soldiers and they would paint it with the blood. It would just pull people in and it started showing them that it’s a joke. Don’t judge a book by its cover. 

We’ve maybe mentioned or shown a sexual scene like three times in 18 years, in a book. If it’s in there, it’s there because it’s part of the story and not because we’re trying to do like anything horny or anything like that. But it’s tough because I see it from both ends and I’m so desensitized by it. I don’t even realize when I’m pulling off references for all of our covers. Nobody search my Google. (Laughs) It’s crazy because once you start talking to people, and you show them and you tell them, you can just see this shift in their eyes. 

One of my favorite books to do is Neverland. It’s like Peter Pan’s the villain and Hook’s the hero. Then you start telling them. ‘Oh, he sucks the life out of children by absorbing their soul and that’s how he stays young.’ And they’re like, ‘That makes sense’. So I’m like, ‘Yeah. Now check out the rest of these.’ I read stuff on a message board or Facebook and you kind of get numb to it. It doesn’t matter. People that say that, they haven’t read the books. They’re like, ‘Oh, all they do is this’ and I’m like, ‘You definitely didn’t read any of the books. So I’m I’m not worried about your opinion, because you’re forming it out of nowhere.’

Adam Pope: Yeah and you guys are here and growing. So obviously it works. People do get the interest enough that they open the book and they see a premise that’s amazing. Everything you guys are talking about, I’m just like, ‘Clever twist, clever twist, clever twist.’ It’s amazing.

Michael Cannetti: I mean, they did The Three Musketeers and it’s two female musketeers and one male musketeer and they have different powers and they work off of each other. It’s really interesting stuff. What I love about Zenescope is it’s a unique reimagining of these older established characters.

I’m actually really excited for a book that’s coming out tomorrow is Grimm Fairy Tales 74, which you wrote. I love Skye as a character who’s basically the daughter of the the original Snow White, she’s got all kinds of wild powers. It’s really interesting. She’s crossing over with Red Agent, who’s one of my favorite characters, and I can’t wait to pick it up. The question I have is: Of all the different Grimm characters, what is a crossover event that you’d like to do and cross over characters with each other?

Dave Franchini: I haven’t seen Belle with Van Helsing and I haven’t seen Belle with Robyn [Hood]. It doesn’t mean we won’t. So I’d really like that. I’m very interested to see those characters interact. It’s like, you don’t know what they’re going to say to each other until you start getting them to talk to each other and then all of a sudden you get the banter between them. So I mean, there’s definitely that. I want to see Cinderella meet Gretel. It’d be a great fight. Because Gretel can take damage from Cindy. So there’s a lot of things I want to see still. And there’s stuff you’re gonna see coming up that we haven’t seen yet. We already have plans for a few things coming up.

Adam Pope: I am curious though. We’re talking about crossovers here. Obviously in the 90’s crossovers were huge. Marvel and DC were even crossing over in those days. So this is a question that Michael actually threw out to Dave [Wohl] last time. If you could bring in another character from another publisher into the Zenescope universe. If you guys were able to strike a deal. Who would it be and who would you want them to cross over with, if you‘re writing?

Dave Franchini: I mean, I can give you a weird answer. It’d be Winnie the Pooh. It’s just like a talking bear and these people are just like, ‘What’s going on here?’ Now let me think…

Michael Canetti: I can see the [Teenage Mutant Ninja] Turtles with Robyn [Hood] in New York City. 

Dave Franchini: I would love Ninja Turtles, but like my fear is I think I would I be too scared to ever write them into our world, just because I wouldn’t want to ruin them for myself. Actually I love The Darkness. Darkness is literally one of my favorite characters. So bringing him into a Robyn story or even like a Gretel story, because she would perceive him as almost witchcraft. That’d be really cool. There’s definitely a few different ones. I mean, I wouldn’t go Spider-Man or Superman. I just don’t think it would fit into our world. But probably for me, I would probably find the weirdest possible thing ever. I like weird stories too and I like things that make me laugh. So it’d be something like, Bone would come in. And it would just be like, he’s attracted to Cindy and realizing that she’s insane and that she’s not like Thorne.

Michael Cannetti: What I love about Zenescope is you kind of have a small, sort of family community within the company itself. How do you guys maintain that connectivity with each other and keep the fandom going?

Dave Franchini: We just like each other. I mean, we’ve been together for so long. And we’ve seen it in every company, if people don’t click, they normally don’t stay long. The people that are there, we all click and it’s just weird. With Joe and Ralph, they were my bosses, but I would go to conventions with them and hang out with them at restaurants and bars and just kind of just be ingrained into this family. Also some of them are actually part of their family. Like Joe’s sister-in-law or one of Joe’s friends for 30 years is one of our elite sales guys. We all just kind of get along. We’re all quirky and weird. Not to the point of being crazy, that we know of. But we all bounce off each other and laugh all day. The topics we talk about probably should be frowned upon . (Laughs) But everybody in there from sales, marketing, shipping, they’re all creative people. We all feed off each other and make each other laugh or we build ideas for things. Even when we complain, which we do, we complain and then we make a sales idea off of it. Like, ‘We have too many of these or what’s going on with this.’ So we just work together because we want the company to succeed, because this is all of our lives and we’re putting so much of our life into this that we want it to be better. 

Michael Cannetti: Dave, again, thank you so much for being on our podcast. We loved having you. It’s so fantastic to talk to you.

Dave Franchini: Thanks for having me on. I really appreciate it. You guys are fun, I could talk to you forever. I’m glad you’re a super fan. That makes me even happier, because it means all the nights I don’t sleep, that somebody else is at least benefiting.

We want to thank Dave Franchini for his time and remind you that we will be returning in a few weeks to present our interview with co-founder of Zenescope Entertainment, Ralph Tedesco. Make sure to check out our interview with David Wohl, Editor in Chief of Zenescope.

You can also see the video version of this interview on the Popgeeks YouTube channel here.