Greg Irons
Quick Facts
Biography
Greg Irons (September 29, 1947 – November 14, 1984) was a poster artist, underground cartoonist, animator and tattoo artist. Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, he moved to San Francisco, California, in 1967, where he soon found work doing posters for Bill Graham at The Fillmore Auditorium.
After working on the film Yellow Submarine, he returned to work for Graham Productions and soon branched out into album covers and comix work for the Print Mint, Last Gasp Eco-Funnies, and other local underground publishers. Irons' collaborations with writer Tom Veitch in the early 1970s (the creative team known as "GI/TV") included such titles as Deviant Slice Funnies, Legion of Charlies, and contributions to many other underground comix, including Skull Comix and Slow Death. His solo comic Light Comitragies was published in June 1971 by the Print Mint.
In the mid-1970s he started doing book illustrations mainly for Bellerophon Books.One of his books was a coloring-book format illustration of Chaucer's "The Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale" which was issued with "The Miller's Tale" illustrated by Gilbert Shelton. In 1979 he illustrated The Official Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Coloring Album which was both a coloring book and a mini adventure module written by Gary Gygax. It was also around this time he began doing tattooing.
On November 14, 1984, while on a working vacation in Bangkok, Thailand, Irons was struck and killed by a bus.
The August 1985 issue of Swamp Thing, vol. 2, issue 39, written by Alan Moore, is dedicated to Greg Irons.