Rip Off Press was founded in San Francisco in 1969 by four hippies from Texas: underground cartoonists Gilbert Shelton and Jack Jackson, former computer tech Fred Todd and resident maniac Dave Moriaty. San Francisco's Underground Comix scene was just beginning to flower, and the fledgling company's earliest publications included Shelton's Hydrogen Bomb Funnies and reprints of R. Crumb's Comix & Stories April 1964 and Jaxon's God Nose. In 1971 the first collection of Gilbert Shelton's Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers was published, and a worldwide phenomenon was born.

Through the turbulent, hedonistic decade of the 1970's the company grew and flourished like, er, a weed... A peak was reached when Universal Studios paid $250,000 for the rights on a live-action Freak Brothers movie--which was unfortunately never made. The rights have been the subject of negotiations with several parties since then, so far without
result (wealthy arts patrons and movie producers please e-mail proposals).

Jaxon and Moriaty returned to Texas early on, and in 1979 Gilbert Shelton (burned out, perhaps, by the period of intense negotiations preceding the movie deal) began what would be the first of several sabbaticals in Europe. Fred Todd and his wife, Kathe, saw the company through the repressive years of the Reagan era by a combination of hard work, dogged persistence and creative invention.

Gilbert took up permanent residence in France, a few months before the company had to be moved out of the building on 17th Street it had occupied for 15 years. The Todds moved the company to smaller quarters, with operations in one building and the comix, stock and surplus equipment in a cheap space in a big warehouse in the Bayview District. In April of '86 that warehouse burned to the ground, following explosions from a clandestine fireworks factory. That freed Rip Off Press of a 17 year accumulation of material goods, and the following year the Todds made good their escape from the urban landscape to the pleasant rural environs of Auburn, California.

Now in this small, historic Gold Rush town for over a decade, Rip Off Press has gradually seeped into its cultural fabric-- subverting the predominant flavor of Baptist/Republican with a taste of the old Revolution.

Marvel Comics' attempts to bolster its bottom line at the expense of the comics industry as a whole resulted, during the late 1990's, in the complete collapse of the existing comics distribution system. Again. This was the second time in 30 years that all the distributors had gone out of business owing us money, and we began to reconfigure our operations for leaner times. In summer of 1999 we closed our Kemper Road location and put the company into smaller quarters, no longer open to the public. We've cut back our publishing program too, and are focusing mostly on keeping the classic undergrounds in print in addition to shipping comix all over the world through our online catalog.

Fred was a computer tech back when Univac was king and an analog computer with less power than you need to be viewing this message took up an entire large, air conditioned room. Rip Off Press got automated in 1979, and for a Mom 'n' Pop, non-computer oriented company we've done pretty well at staying on the forefront of desktop technology. Now he's MCSE certified and is employed as a network wrangler when he's not working for ROP. We launched our first web site in 1996 and went online with our first secure commerce site in mid-1997. The online catalog has now expanded to include secure online ordering for over 1,000 in-stock items. , improving constantly with the increasing skills of its Webmistress (Kathe).