There are two colour plates in this retrospective of artist Joe Coleman that he himself serves to draw comparisons between: the first - Physician Heal Thyself, 1992 - is a sickeningly explicit feast of surgery and pathology, while the second - The Waiting Room, 1990 - is for this artist a relatively restrained depiction of a hospital waiting room; the hollow eyed patients stare blankly at the viewer. Both are depictions of Hell, but the former, to Coleman, is preferable because, "at least...something is going on."

Performance artist and painter, Joe Coleman's work has drawn favourable comparisons to the great Hieronymous Bosch and with good reason, peppered as it is with the deformed, ill-favoured dregs of society, not least among which subjects is the artist himself. This lavish coffee-table book contains a number of self-portraits, from the relatively straight, if wild-eyed, Self-Portrait, and the manic grotesques in The Geek Is Arrested (alluding to a performance that left him in police custody) to Portrait of Professor Momboozoo, Coleman's alter-ego known to appear live with explosives strapped his body and a fish hanging out of his trousers, only to bite the heads of rats. (This latter featured heavily on his obscure but quite astonishing picture disc LP, The Infernal Machine, released by Blast First in 1990). Elsewhere it's the margins of society that elicit his attentions - comic-strip adaptations of the lives of mass murderer Carl Panzram and Boxcar Bertha, full-colour portraits of cannibal Albert Fish (Coleman owns the infamous letter Fish sent to the mother of his last child-victim) and a celebrated image of Charles Manson, who, with typically incoherent alacrity is quoted on the cover as saying of the artist, "Praise! Praise! Praise! He's a caveman in a space ship."

Most valuable to collectors of this art in extremis are reproductions (unfortunately not in colour) of several bookcovers, illustrations, and especially Coleman's banned one-sheet for John McNaughton's brilliant debut feature, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, as well as some early black and white plates from the mid-70s that, although raw, show-case his obsessive, meticulous style to great effect - as McNaughton himself describes, "Like an act of violence (they) compel you to look at them."

In his glowing foreword, Robert Crumb invokes the twin fiends of S. Clay Wilson and Robert Williams, and for good reason: Coleman's pictures retain the morbid, sepulchral detail of the former, where violence reigns supreme in a stinking, decaying world, but with the exaggerated comic creation of the latter. And it would be easy to see all this as very much pose on the artist's part - it has never been easier to elicit response from a straight society than playing the maverick outsider. Against this is a lengthy interview that presages the work itself, which despite some achingly pretentious questioning, allows Coleman to explain the demons that drive him in welcome detail, illustrated with photographs of his freakshow collection of skulls, waxworks, pickled babies, two-headed calves. "Shocking has never been my intent," he says. "I'm dealing with extremes of human emotion, which have to be explained in extreme ways."

Joe Coleman's work is that of a true edge-dweller, a man driven to the periphery by whatever evils (and they are many) stalk that head of his; it's not a great mental leap to suppose the destructive impulses thankfully contained by this stuff. It's XXX-rated art for an XXX-rated world, work so gut-driven in its sheer viciousness and outright horror that it inexplicably runs full circle to become both immensely tragic and enormously affecting. In evoking pathos from this sewer of images lies Joe Coleman's real talent.