Fresh Comics

In this imaginatively conceived historical graphic novel, Guy Colwell explores the story behind Hieronymus Bosch and his most famous work.

In Guy Colwell's first full graphic novel in over 30 years, we see one painter, Colwell himself, consider another, Hieronymus Bosch, and the story behind the latter's most notable work told in sequential panels. The known details of Bosch's life, and the commissioning of his enormous triptych, "The Garden of Earthly Delights," are scant. Colwell takes the facts of Bosch's time and setting and constructs a tale of a man and artist torn equally among piety, creativity, and commerce. In Colwell's version of Jheronimus van Aken (Bosch's real name), he is an artist paid well by local dukes to paint a vision of the world before the fall, but will the religious leaders of his village see it as celebrating God's creation, or fatally corrupted by sensuality? And what of the increasing numbers of young models needed to depict pre-apple innocence?

This imaginatively conceived graphic biography is Colwell's crowning achievement in a cartooning career, begun in the underground comix movement of the 1970s, and marked by risk-taking and political engagement. His drawing, rendering, and storytelling has never been as self-assured as in Delights.

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).