COLWELL, Guy. Inner City Romance.

(San Francisco, CA): Last Gasp Eco-Funnies, 1978. First edition. Softcover. 25.4cm by 17.8cm. Unpaginated. Final issue of Colwell’s influential and uncompromising underground comix series chronicling prison life, racial injustice, poverty, drug culture, and street survival in 1970s urban America. Drawing heavily upon his experiences as a draft resister imprisoned at McNeil Island Federal Penitentiary, Colwell developed Inner City Romance into one of the most politically engaged and socially realist titles of the underground comix movement. Unlike the more overtly psychedelic or satirical strains of underground comix, Colwell’s work combined explicit sexuality with a stark documentary sensibility, focusing on Black urban experience, incarceration, police violence, addiction, and radical politics with unusual seriousness and empathy. Stories in this issue include “All Over the Clover,” “Good for You,” “Inter Kids,” “Sex Crime,” and “Down Up.” Although long overshadowed by better-known underground cartoonists, Colwell’s work has undergone substantial critical reassessment in recent years and is now widely regarded as among the most important socially conscious underground comics of the period. A very good in stapled wrappers.