My name is Brad Rohloff, I’m an artist and publisher living in Chicago. I’ve ran a publishing house called Bred Press since 2014 putting out artist books and alt comics of my own and of stuff I like! I’m making jokes all the time. I co-ran a comics reading called Zine Not Dead from 2015 until 2024, and I’m currently half of Frog Home Video- a bootleg movie shirt project I started with my friend Ben Marcus of Goodbye Press.

Top 3 favorite or most visited websites and why?

Right now I am constantly on a site called New Recruit which helps you build and customize Warhammer 40,000 army lists. I recently got back into 40k with my friends Trey Rozell and Mac Pierce, we have a weekly 40k night of working on models and hanging out, and we’ve gotten a couple games in. We’re always updating our lists and figuring out what the other person is bringing to the table (literally). I’m basically looking at a text spreadsheet all the time and adjusting like, 1 gun on a dude at a time.I also am unfortunately looking at reddit/instagram a lot and my bigcartel for when I’m shipping orders. I did quit X the everything app and my life has gotten better.

What is it like living and working in Chicago?

It’s awesome. Chicago best city in the US. Chicago Hot Dog best Hot Dog. Cheap if you know where to look, you can be a living working artist pretty easily here. The scene is big but also not too big. Big small town feeling to me. I’ve been here for 16 years now and I’ve met and befriended a ton of people all across the city.

Always inspired by my friends and contemporaries. In comics there are a lot of bright shining stars but around that there are so, so many genuine beautiful weirdos and insanely talented people just happy to be making stuff. I finally took a painting class last spring, I had never worked with oil paints before, and that’s a whole new way of constructing an image to me. My prints are exploded out in these dozen or so layers and planned colors, and painting just an entirely different way of blocking out and building up an image that I’ve really been tripping out on the minutiae of.I work at the Art Institute as an art handler and I get to see so much stuff behind the scenes and up close. Like we’re installing a Carrol Dunham show right now, and while I knew like a couple of his pieces, seeing such a variety across his career together is cool. The resources at work are great- I can pull prints for view from the archive. I’m basically staring at art constantly.

What are some recent, upcoming or current projects you are working on?

Always trying to have the ball rolling on something. I’m working on a new hat right now, but also some art objects and a bumper sticker too. Soon another shirt for Frog Home Video. It’s stuff to make and sell sure, that’s always been a motivation. Art as multiple as product. Ya gotta eat, you know? I have a few screenprints I’ve drawn up the transparencies for but had no time to run as a real print yet. My focus has been home studio kind of stuff for now.Also I’m trying to get all the Warhammer shit out of my system before the fall. I’m trying to go to Grad School and I definitely have to finish building my army before that starts haha.

How do you go about finding things you’re interested in publishing?

It’s usually someone like I’ve known about for a bit, or is in my orbit in some way already. I don’t think I have ever followed through with someone pitching a book to me, I am usually the one reaching out about something. I’m always looking for someone who’s work I think would translate well to the page, either a cool color separation type thing or strategy to make it look great. I can be looking at someone’s work just thinking of how I would print it, how it could come together in Screenprint or Risograph. I love, love being surprised by people’s visual shorthand as they draw. There will always be someone who can render something in a way you never expected, a way you’ve never seen before. That stuff inspires me constantly, it makes me want to process it in my own way through publishing.That said- I’ve also taken a small step back from tabling constantly at book fairs for now, so my output of other people’s work has gone down some. It used to be every year building a roster and having plans for 3, 4 books for different fest debuts etc. and it’s honestly been a bit of a relief to allow myself to slow down there. I’m trying to do Funner Fests Further From Me. I went to Hardcore Art Book Fair in Mexico City last year (it ruled), run by the Can Can Press people (they rule) and had a blast. I met these Indonesian publishers there Grafis Nusantara who run a fest in Jarkarta that I want to go to now too. WHY NOT

How did your interest in your work begin?

I went to SAIC for undergrad a bit ago (BFA 2014) and back then the alt-comics scene felt so, so small (and more insular to Art School kids to be fair). There was no comics program or department, and I started as an animator and eventually became a printmaker/cartoonist (lazier animator). Finding reproduction as great way to make a lot of whatever I wanted, I found my way to high volume printing on the Offset litho press they had at the school. Learning how to run the press and coming up with new things to print every week pushed myself into a lot of new territories. I would learn we were running a blue that day (1 color a day! Oil inks. When I started Risograph it blew my mind you could run 2, 3, 4 colors a session if you wanted) so I’d quickly make a plate of a cloud texture. Print 500 of them, trim them down to full bleed, and just put it out in the hallway at school. The pile would be gone in like an hour. I loved it. Why not make a nice little paper that you can take? I always felt generous with whatever I made, and not *so* precious about it. After graduating I bought my own offset press (AB Dick 360) and ran my own stuff and punished others, along with getting access to a Risograph in 2015 just as it was really becoming a thing among cartoonists. So many cool ways to print a lot of a thing. Something something when you have a hammer everything looks like a nail. It just fit into how I was thinking about making and sharing work.

Frog Home Video is a fun excuse to make bootleg shirts of movies we like. Ben Marcus and I started it living together during the pandemic after we made a The Mummy (1999) shirt together, then The Matrix (1999) and from there just more and more. Some shirts are solo ours, some are collaborated with an outside artist. The Bill Connors and Sarah Squirm shirts have been so sick. Hats, bumper stickers etc. it’s been really fun and not too serious. There are some online ‘movie merch’ brands that are like full businesses. We’ve mostly been able to keep it at the level we like and on our own terms. I’m trying to have fun, man.Zine Not Dead was started with Matt Davis of Perfectly Acceptable Press in 2015. It was a great way to keep in the comics scene, supporting and platforming our friends and artists we admired. We had over 24 events and had over 110 readers. Hosting was really fun and helped me become much more comfortable on stage in front of people. We got to do it at so many different venues including the MCA, a whole church, and countless DIY spaces. It was fun to watch it grow over the years. It sort of culminated in us putting on a single day book fair and reading in 2024, Zine Not Dead Fest. After that we didn’t plan another reading for a while, which then for several reasons turned into an indefinite hiatus for ZND. Felt like the last event was one of the best though.

What do you want someone to walk away with after experiencing Bred Press?

That I’m a genius and they were so impressed they bought 1 of everything. No, I mean I am always trying to have fun making what I make and I want that fun to come across. I feel like I spend a lot of time getting comfortable within structures-a job, a social setting, a creative scene, and then start to deconstruct it and play with it. I meddle and appropriate. I like to say “I make jokes, but I’m not kidding” and the absurdity of some of my work is a huge part of that. The multiples are a huge part of that. What good is having fun if I can’t share it?

Constantly doing free association in my head about basically everything. I’ll find a motif or visual symbol and just go through every iteration of how to make it or change it. I’ve been playing with this meat texture imagery for years. I made a blanket out of it, I made lamps out of it. I made stacks of prints out of it and packaged them so it looked like meat from a supermarket. I wanted to get a full car wrap made of it. I just this month made coasters out of the meat texture and didn’t even think until I was *holding it* that it looked like a hamburger patty. I think sometimes I make something and then realize it’s funnier in some other weird way I didn’t even think of it at first. I dunno. When you make hundred of 1 thing it will reveal its secrets to you. I think every possible joke that can be made already exists metaphysically, because the things the jokes are about already exist, and it’s just about discovering them. It’s unexpected connections. It’s novelty.

I am applying and planning to go Grad School this fall at me alma mater and I am excited about that. I’ve been out of academia for over a decade now and it will be fun to be working full time while doing it. I am a human being. I am ready to enter the cave.

Painting has been really cool I went to make more of them even if there’s only 1 when I’m done. That’s the sad part!!!

Felix Gonzalez Torres for showing me what a multiple can mean. Walter Benjamin’s Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (and John Berger’s Ways of Seeing). The Queer Art of Failure by Jack Halberstam. My undergrad teachers Oli Watt, Alex Valentine, and Todd Rau. The people that I love and that love me. Friends.

It’s always really cool when someone asks to get a tattoo of my work, or just gets one and tells me later!!!!!!