We were curious about Brad’s background and wanted to learn more about his backstory regarding comics. He wrote: “I grew up in Littleton, CO, the suburbs of Denver. I moved around a bunch for college and beyond but ended up settling in Oakland, CA for roughly the past decade now. I work as a freelance illustrator but have been focusing more on my own comics (when life allows) and building my Patreon for the past couple of years. I forget how regular human interaction works.”
He continued: “I first started making comics with my older brother Eric growing up (I have two older brothers and one younger). We had a number of Garfield and Calvin & Hobbes collections and the like, and both liked to doodle. We’d both make our own dumb comics and would even occasionally collaborate, switching off drawing each panel for fun, meandering, improvised comic adventures. Eventually, I made bad comics for the school paper in high school and was an illustrator and comic-maker for my college paper (shoutouts to the Pioneer Log at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, OR, woo, go Pios). After graduating, I did not use my English or Psychology degrees and I moved to Brooklyn and managed to pay for rent and improv classes (lol) by doing miscellaneous illustration jobs through Craigslist using a used Wacom tablet that I got off of eBay in high school for $35 and a pirated version of Photoshop I had on a dinky emachine netbook.”
“I moved around a bit and eventually a comedy news site that I was illustrating for got bought by a tech news site based out of San Francisco, so I moved to the Bay Area for a regular gig with them. They eventually ran out of money to pay me, but I stuck around in the Bay ANYWAY.”
Later on, Brad told us a story about how he created the website soyourlifeismeaningless.com. He continued by sharing what artists and themes inspired his work.
“I was inspired by artists like KC Green who had Gunshow running at the time, and James Kochalka, who was still doing his daily American Elf diary comics. If ‘So Your Life Is Meaningless’ wasn’t a giveaway, I have also long been inspired by themes of depression and finding things to laugh at whilst dwelling in the ‘SHIT’, so to speak.”
