Rare AD&D Coloring Album Cover Painting Heads to Auction in April

Heritage Auctions will offer the original acrylic wraparound cover painting for The Official Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Coloring Album in its Comic Cover Art Showcase auction on April 4, 2026, with bidding already at $3,300 as of press time and the piece leading all other lots in the sale.

The painting was produced by Greg Irons for TSR Hobbies and executed in acrylic on oversized illustration board, with a 32" x 21" image area signed in the lower right. Heritage Auctions describes its condition simply as "In Excellent condition." The coloring album itself is a genuinely obscure corner of D&D history: the book paired its painted cover with an adventure module written by Gary Gygax, making it a crossover artifact from the hobby's earliest commercial era that many veteran players have never encountered. Heritage Auctions leaned into that obscurity in its own catalog copy, calling the piece "a treasure about as rare as a Belt of Giant Strength" and noting that "many hardcore gamers have never even heard of this D&D coloring book."

The artist behind the cover had a career that ranged well beyond TSR. Irons began as a poster designer before working as an animator on The Yellow Submarine and developing a parallel career in underground comix, contributing to Print Mint's Light Comitragies and Last Gasp's Slow Death, among other publications. Tragically, he died at age 37 after being struck by a bus in Thailand, five years after The Official Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Coloring Album was released. His influence on the comics world was recognized posthumously when Alan Moore dedicated Swamp Thing #39, published in 1985, in his honor.

The Comic Cover Art Showcase brings together nearly 80 pieces of original comic cover art. Other lots in the sale include cover paintings for the Hellboy and the B.P.R.D. 1952-1954 Omnibus, Miles Morales Spider-Man #2, and the Barbie Jigsaw Puzzle, alongside Stephen Fabian's 1992 watercolors for Dungeons & Dragons: Ravenloft Forbidden Lore and TSR Toy Fair catalogs from 1983 and 1985. At press time, only the Hellboy and Spider-Man pieces were approaching the AD&D painting's $3,300 leading bid; every other lot in the auction trailed further behind.

The $3,300 figure reflects early bidding and will almost certainly move before the April 4 closing. Anyone tracking the lot can find the full gallery and current bid status directly through Heritage Auctions' listing for the Comic Cover Art Showcase.