From the archive: Greg Irons

Greg Irons at Rip Off Press ca. 1979 - photo by Fred Todd

Born in Philadelphia, PA on September 27th, 1947, Greg grew up loving to draw but without any formal art training other than a few courses in high school. It's possible he spent time drawing when he should have been doing other things: he ended up having to repeat the 10th grade at a military academy where, as he put it, he learned what he didn't want to do. In 1967 he was one of the thousands of young people who flocked to San Francisco for the Summer of Love. There he did poster art for awhile, before taking off to spend two years overseas.

In Europe Greg got work as a tracer on the animation team producing the Beatles' Yellow Submarine, and did more poster work for the Fairport Convention. Returning to the Bay Area in 1969, the year Rip Off Press was founded, he produced his first solo comic book: Heavy, published by Berkeley's Print Mint. Through the '70's he turned out much more work for underground newspapers like the Berkeley Barb, and comix such as Up From the Deep, Slow Death and Skull. He often teamed with Tom Veitch, whose style blended well with his own. As a more steady source of income, he illustrated coloring books for Bellerophon Press.

Greg had a lifelong interest in martial arts and Asian culture, and in the late '70's this interest took him into the field of tattooing. He first plied a needle at Dean's in San Francisco's North Beach in 1978, then moved to Seattle to work at the Tattoo Emporium. Back in San Francisco again in 1982, he worked at Henry Goldfield's. In addition to his work in parlors, he went freelance at tattooing conventions around the world between 1980 and 1984. By now he had virutally left comix behind, devoting full time to tattoo art.

In the spring of 1984 Greg embarked on a world tour of tattooing hotspots, attending the Amsterdam convention first and then moving on to Belgium. By fall of 1984 he'd made his way to Asia, planning to wind up the trip in Honolulu before returning to the West Coast. But it was not to be. Probably forgetting to look for traffic in the right direction (in Asia, as in Britain, traffic drives on the "wrong" side of the road), Greg stepped off the curb and into the path of a moving bus. He was run down and killed immediately. He was only 37, and his work was hardly begun. His artwork lives on in his comix-and on the skin of his tattoo customers, hopefully for many years to come. It's a great shame that he never got the chance to realize his full potential.

In 1987 Rip Off Press published two collections of Greg's work under the Underground Classics banner. Both volumes are now out of print, but may be available in the Collectors' Items category.

Tags: