Jim Osborne represented the dark side of the Age of Aquarius. His characters inhabited the subterranean hideaways of San Francisco's Tenderloin and Mission neighborhoods, out of public sight until the sun went down. Known to his colleagues as The Dark Prince of the Underground, Osborne had a brief but fruitful career as a cartoonist, before quitting cold turkey in the mid 1970s when the comix movement reached its peak. "All comics are good for are for wrapping fish heads," he told me in a 1973 interview.

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He died in 2002 in a cheap boarding house, three empty bottles of vodka stuffed down the side of his mattress and a to do list on his night table.

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Now his work is being collected into an anthology of his underground comix, with biographical details that tell of his motivations and frustrations.

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The book will be released under the Fantagraphics Underground imprint in the near future. 

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