Reviews for You Call This Art?! : A Greg Irons Retrospective

The average rating for You Call This Art?! : A Greg Irons Retrospective based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2010-09-23 00:00:00 William Jones In the early '70s, Irons worked with the writer Tom Veitch on underground comics that aimed to push the gory shock effects of EC horror comics to another dimension; today, this stuff (which invariably concludes with some kind of cannibal feast) looks crude and grungy but has a heartfelt intensity that's still potent. After a frustrating attempt to make a living for himself doing legit work for fiscally shaky book publishers, Irons went back to underground comics, with a more visually refined style applied to political protest stories and autobiographical rants (starring his alter ego, Gregor, a "purple-ass baboon") set in low-income urban bohemia. Irons was killed in an accident in 1984, which means that he died at a point when his main area of expression was already considered dead; he didn't live to see it fan out, expand its audience, and develop a degree of critical respectability as "indie" or "alternative" comics. Everything in this book, which includes art created for album covers, concert posters, tattoos, and children's coloring books, as well as extensive biographical notes and angry letters from employers, isn't golden, but taken together, it gives you a fascinating overview of a career suspended in its moment in time like amber, and the life of an artist who may never have graduated to the level of his greatest colleagues but was incapable, maybe partly to his disappointment, of turning himself into a hack.

Review # 2 was written on 2009-11-19 00:00:00 Lisa Weisz Greg Irons did some great, wild, disgusting shit, and whether he was politically ranting or tattooing drunk sailors he did it (the shit) with heart. It's hard not to admire a man who had a talent and spent his short life trying to live off it (the talent) instead of the rat race. Legion of Charlies is a great comic, his 'GI/TV 'Nam funnies' are great, but as I sit here watching Kojak with a boner for a cigarette and coffee I find his Gregor the Purpleass Baboon stories just a little too real. Moral of the story: look both ways before crossing the street in Bangkok. "Greg and I got together in his Potrero Hill home where we shared synthetic psilocybin and found our brainwaves flowing together down a sympathetic channel that became a groove for many years to come" - Tom Veitch.