Overview

Guy Colwell's 1970s underground comic book series Inner City Romance tread new territory: it was filled with stories about prison, black culture, ghetto life, the sex trade, and radical activism. It portrayed the unpleasant realities of life in the inner city, where opportunities were limited and being on the lowest end of the economic ladder meant that one's vision of the American dream was more about survival than lifestyle choices. Every issue of Inner City Romance is included in this collection, as well as many of the highly detailed paintings Colwell created at the time. In an accompanying text piece, Colwell provides context for the material.

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9781606998137

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Reviews

Relying on his own experiences in prison and fractious San Francisco neighbourhoods, Colwell creates a vision of inner-city life that remains compelling multiracial, marginalized, but collectively working for change. --Sean Rogers Fine artist and painter Colwell s sporadically appearing stories of race, class and culture are collected here, along with some of his other amazing work. The unique anti-racist series was a cult favorite, with little known about its creator; was he black or white? Helpful and revealing essays complement this representation of one of the greats of the golden age of underground comix. --Richard Pachter These gritty, sometimes hedonistic short stories about multiracial prison and low-income life spare no details of sex, drugs, or radical activism. --Martha Cornog Guy Colwell s brilliant Inner City Romance is an intense, often sexually explicit and darkly violent comic that tells stories of ordinary life in a way that s neither Pekaresque nor picaresque. At times it feels like a graphic documentary of inner city life; at times a startling flight of dark imagination; at times a brilliant character study of people who have been forgotten or ignored by the larger mainstream society. Earthy, smart, passionate, intelligent and endlessly surprising, Inner City Romance is a true comics classic. Thank goodness it s no longer a lost classic. --Jason Sacks Page after page, the drama unfolds. Guy Colwell's new full collection of his Inner City Romance comic is a roller coaster ride through stories that will frighten, provoke and amuse. ... Get into the deep, dark trenches of Colwell's mind as you read through this collection. It's heady stuff. --Kristin Farr It is a fascinating, engrossing, powerful investigation of an artist addressing his times.The collected ICR takes a sustained, unflinching look at lower depth America through a variety of lenses. --Bob Levin The sociopolitical parables of Inner City Romance... are pure, uncut products of cagey, post-Sixties radicalism. Across five issues, cartoony-photorealist from the Bay Guy Colwell shakes off his free love hangover and wrestles with the disillusionment that pops-up once idealism hits a wall. ... There s no other underground comic quite like this one. --Brandon Soderberg While it remains something of an anomaly in the chronology of underground comix, the book remains significant in a way that few of its peers in the movement can still boast. ... With a remarkably concise body of work Colwell established himself as one of the most essential cartoonists of his era, and deserves a wider readership today. --Tim O'Neil Thank God... for Fantagraphics new reprinting of Guy Colwell s Inner City Romance. The most politically cogent of the San Francisco underground comics by leaps and bounds, it s a book full of messages that resonate as strongly today as they did forty years ago...: this is essential work, the kind that demands to be seen and reckoned with no matter the time or the place. ... If the lack of dust the stories in Inner City Romance have accrued with age is startling, Colwell s imagery is downright mind-blowing... --Matt Seneca

Guy Colwell s brilliant Inner City Romance is an intense, often sexually explicit and darkly violent comic that tells stories of ordinary life in a way that s neither Pekaresque nor picaresque. At times it feels like a graphic documentary of inner city life; at times a startling flight of dark imagination; at times a brilliant character study of people who have been forgotten or ignored by the larger mainstream society. Earthy, smart, passionate, intelligent and endlessly surprising, Inner City Romance is a true comics classic. Thank goodness it s no longer a lost classic. --Jason Sacks

The sociopolitical parables of Inner City Romance... are pure, uncut products of cagey, post-Sixties radicalism. Across five issues, cartoony-photorealist from the Bay Guy Colwell shakes off his free love hangover and wrestles with the disillusionment that pops-up once idealism hits a wall. ... There s no other underground comic quite like this one. --Brandon Soderberg

Author Information

Guy Colwell is a painter and comics artist best known for his bestselling underground comix series Inner City Romance (collected into a volume published by Fantagraphics in 2015). He worked extensively as an illustrator, cartoonist and color artist for underground newspapers and publishers from the 1970s into the 1990s, between sabbaticals for environmental research travel and social action. His other books include Street Scenes (2015), In Fox's Forest (2016), and Doll (2019). He lives in Berkeley, CA.

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