Rip Off Press

Dave Moriaty decided that the key to the universe was a printing press, recalled Fred Todd. Moriaty convinced Todd and two more old college friends from the University of Texas, Gilbert Shelton and Jack Jackson, to buy into his burning vision with cold cash. None of them knew how to run a press at the time, said Todd, but how hard could it be? "We started off with a Davidson 233. It's like the Studebaker of printing presses. We filled the place up with cheap equipment. I called it museum-quality stuff. It was interesting to look at and it showed various stages of technological development, but you didn't want to work on it. But we tried anyway."

Transplanted Texans in San Francisco were already making good headway in the counterculture, like Chet Helms and the Family Dog at the Avalon Ballroom, and Janis Joplin and Steve Miller in the music business. Shelton thought their contacts in the "Texas Mafia" could bring them jobs printing dance posters. Jaxon also wanted to bring his 1964 comic, God Nose back into print. All three believed they could make more money through profit sharing, if they handled production and distribution themselves. It was a wild and wooly startup, but they forged on and within two years had become a major underground comic publisher.

Despite the economic rivalry between publishers and the ongoing philosophical debates among cartoonists during the years of the underground, everyone in the comix scene agreed on one thing: Rip Off Press threw the best parties.

These excerpts are from an interview conducted with Gilbert Shelton on May 11, 1972 at Rip Off Press in San Francisco.

PATRICK ROSENKRANZ: How did Rip Off Press come about?

GILBERT SHELTON: Me and the other three guys each came up with $75 and put a down payment on a printing press and started doing job printing. We were doing posters for the Avalon Ballroom. First it was in the attic of an old building over in the Fillmore. That building burned down. They moved to a couple of other places, finally here (17th Street).

ROSENKRANZ: Was it an offset press?

SHELTON: Yeah, we still got it. It was a 14 x 17 inch press. We bought it for $1000, a $300 down payment. That's the humble beginning of the mighty Rip Off Publishing Empire.

ROSENKRANZ: Why didn't you just let Print Mint do your books? Did they have too much to handle?

SHELTON: I don't know. It was just four people with nothing to do, mainly. We weren't into comic books right exactly at first, it was more like posters.

ROSENKRANZ: Did you ever design any?

SHELTON: I did one with Crumb. Crumb was gone somewhere and I took one of his drawings and made a poster out of it... added color to it and everything. That's the only poster I ever did here in San Francisco. I did a bunch back in Texas, for dances and stuff.

ROSENKRANZ: Do you ever get tired of being a comix publisher?

SHELTON: I don't do much for the Rip Off Press. I just get this room here for free, and give them a few books, which we split the profits on. That's on a royalty basis. As far as running the business, Fred Todd, Dave Moriaty and Jack Jackson do that.

ROSENKRANZ: Do you pay your artists a $25 flat rate per page?

SHELTON: We split the profits 50-50 per book. It comes down to a little more than the standard royalty of a nickel a book that the Print Mint pays, but not much more.

ROSENKRANZ: Well, in some books, like your Furry Freak Brothers, that comes to quite a bit more money, doesn't it?

SHELTON: That remains to be seen. Actually, not much more, so far. We've got production problems, lots of production expenses. We have a learn-as-we-go program here, a printing school.

ROSENKRANZ: Have any of you had any former training, maybe working as an apprentice in a print shop?

SHELTON: Nope.

ROSENKRANZ: How did you know how to run the press you bought?

SHELTON: We had a friend who said he knew how to run a press. All five of us got together and fucked around with it until we made it work. You can see in a lot of those early posters, that we messed up a lot of them.

These excerpts are from an interview with Jack Jackson conducted on May 8, 1972 in San Francisco.

JACK JACKSON: The idea at Rip Off has always been -- it's not how many books we do, but how good the ones that we do are. That was originally what went into us splitting off from the Print Mint. The Print Mint was doing good books but they were also doing terrible books. I began to wonder if they really knew the difference. I felt that the best way -- especially when the phenomena was early in its growth -- the best way to make sure it didn't kill itself immediately was to try to keep a quality standard of some sort going. I disputed their opinion as to what was quality material. We split off and decide to use our own judgment, to do our own things. I think there will come a point that there will be so many books out that people will be so confused in terms of which one to buy. They'll be so disappointed in a lot of the books that they buy that the whole thing will fall off. But fine, I'll welcome that point. Let it fall off. Let it not become so feasible economically for everyone to jump on the bandwagon.

ROSENKRANZ: You probably see a lot of bad art submitted for Rip Off titles.

JACKSON: The thing is, a lot of the artists, even though their first effort's not so hot, they grow. They get better with time. When Sheridan and Schrier first hit town from Cleveland, they dropped by. I took a look at Sheridan's stuff and it really knocked me out. It was great stuff. Then Schrier's stuff came out and it was terrible. Jesus. I kind of said, Sheridan, we'd love to publish your stuff, but I don't know about Schrier yet. Sheridan said we only publish together. We said OK, what the hell and did it. Within a year Schrier's style had developed to where it was almost better in some respects than Sheridan's. It reflected a lot of his influence at first, but now Schrier's drawing is just as far out in its own way as Sheridan's is. But at the point, I was willing to write him off, and say, this guy just doesn't have it. You can be fooled. You have to try to look at new material that's not so good, and try to see the potential in it.

ROSENKRANZ: Who were some of the people at Print Mint when you broke off and formed Rip Off?

JACKSON: Don Schenker was in it and I really liked Don. He did some articles right when the thing started that really helped give it a boost and helped keep the thing going. I just had the feeling that whatever it was that he was doing, other people could do it just as well. It wasn't a personal grudge or anything. For one reason, I wanted to see us making more money. I couldn't see that the distributor was making as much money as the artist was making or more money in fact. At that point, we were printing our own books and selling them at 16-1/2 cents or something like that -- a finished book. We not only drew the books, but we had the book printed. For a finished copy, we were handing it to him and getting 16-1/2 cents. He was selling the damn things and getting 30 cents for them. Just for his function as a distributor, he was making as much as we had made not only to conceive the book, but also produce it. I thought that was a little unfair. I thought we could do better if we had the means of production in our own hands, and furthermore, if we could develop the distribution function as well. That seemed to be where the money was at. That's why we started the artist's cooperative and why we started out obtaining equipment.

ROSENKRANZ: When was that?

JACKSON: That was in 1968 or '69, somewhere in there. Don said that we'd regret it. He said you're going to find yourself using your energy for something besides what you want to be doing, which is drawing. I said maybe so, but it's something we got to do. As it turned out, there were enough people that we knew, who got their creative kicks from the production end of things, like printing, film work and all of that, to where the whole thing doesn't really detract that much from my work. Gilbert and I are the two partners at Rip Off that are into artwork. Fred Todd runs the distribution thing, and Moriaty is kind of the press lord and he runs the shop. A lot of people come and go, but the thing manages to have some sort of continuity in itself. Also it gives Todd and Moriaty an opportunity to trip out. Moriaty is into writing. He's primarily a journalist. Now we're doing the Rip Off Review of Western Culture. So he can get his rocks off doing that. They're printing it down there right now. It will be out in a couple of weeks.

ROSENKRANZ: What kind of distribution do you have set up around the country? Is it all mail order out of here or do you have offices in other places?

JACKSON: No, we ship everything out of here. We're acquiring more and more distributors, but the best luck we've had has been directly with the retail stores. We probably have a better mailing list in terms of the new culture or the underground or whatever. People like Playboy would probably love to have our mailing list. It's just a holdover from the poster thing and a gradual accumulation of new names that have come in. Now it's pretty sizeable.6 We don't do any advertising except our own little promotion things, leaflets, and little posters and brochures that we send directly to the accounts. We don't advertise on a national level. We strictly keep it in the family as it were.

ROSENKRANZ: Do you think it's a good thing to have the underground comix centered here in San Francisco?

JACKSON: Rather than having all the underground comix coming out of San Francisco, it makes a lot more sense having people in Chicago, people in New York, people here and people there develop their own centers for producing the same sort of thing. A lot of these people wanted us to publish their material, when in fact, they should have been publishing their own material. This was the sort of thing that came down early with Bijou. At one point it looked like the Print Mint was going to do it. Then no, they wanted to do it themselves. Then Krupp came into the picture in Milwaukee. As far as I'm concerned, the more people that are doing it, the better. I hate to see everything being centralized into one place. I'd like to see about 15 or 20 cities with their own equivalent of Rip Off Press. I'm not really concerned about cornering the market. We're talking about free exchange of ideas and it only gets fouled up when you get into the economic picture, when people start concerning themselves with business hassles. As long as you can keep it on an idea exchange thing, everything is really great. The more places you have ideas coming from, the healthier the whole thing is going to be. We've had an influx of cartoonists coming in from all over, principally from New York. There's probably been by now ten or more artists out here from New York, and more coming all the time. They've virtually abandoned the scene out there and decided to move out here where all the action is. I'd just like to see the thing spread out a little bit. You get into a lot of petty hassles when all this energy is focused in one little area.

[To read the rest of this feature, please see The Comics Journal #264.]

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