Alton Kelley

Alton Kelley, who along with his creative partner Stanley Mouse, created the iconic posters for the Avalon Ballroom and Fillmore Auditorium, has died. Kelley also created the Grateful Dead "Deadhead" logo and the Steve Miller Band "Pegasus" logo.

When I was a much younger my brother Jack used to collect the small posters from the Avalon and the Fillmore, many of them featuring the work of Mouse and Kelley, and so my teen years were spent in bedrooms with walls covered by the Mouse/Kelley artwork. Do a Google image search of "Alton Kelley" or check out this website and be dazzled by the amazing collection of psychedelic posters that he and Mouse created. Depending on your age, it might make you feel young again.

When I mentioned this on the Tony Isabella board, fellow Tony boarder Rob Allen reminded us that, "Those Kelley/Mouse posters from the 1960s, along with similar posters by other artists, have a lot of significance in the comics world. The posters were so popular that by 1966 there was an established network that distributed posters to stores in & around the Bay Area, and eventually to points beyond.

When artists in San Francisco started publishing comix, they were sold thru this same network, which quickly spread across the country. In a few years the poster business faded, and the distributors focused on comix. A decade or so later, a comix distributor in New York finally convinced Marvel and DC to sell him their comics the same way Last Gasp and Rip Off Press did. The "Direct Market" basically meant Marvel and DC adopting the undergrounds' way of selling their wares - which derived from the popularity of psychedelic posters in San Francisco.

So the next time you pick up the contents of your pull box at your LCS (local comic shop), thank Alton Kelley, Stanley Mouse and the hippies who loved their art."