The Odditorium is where it all happens, out there on the shores of Brooklyn, where Joe Coleman keeps watch over his collection of horrors and amusements, artifacts and evidence, keepsakes and family friends. There are life-sized wax figures of O.J. Simpson and Fidel Castro, of vampires and politicians. There are vintage murder weapons and mummified body parts. And somewhere in a jar of formaldehyde sits “Junior,” Coleman's adopted stillborn son and beloved grotesque. Sideshow stuff. Books, taxidermy, artwork – crowding the living room of his four-room apartment, right across the water from the tip of Manhattan where the World Trade Center towers once stood.

He never chose to enjoy that view from his studio, which has its windows sealed tight from the sun, and is lit by a single 100-watt bulb. Coleman needs that kind of stark, uncomplicated light for his paintings. It is there that he toils over his large wooden canvases, with his jeweler's lenses and single-hair brushes, searching and struggling with the details of a stark yet horribly complicated world. He has spent the last quarter-century purging and embracing his demons through art, an angry artist obsessed with decay and the extremes of human behavior, especially his own.

Coleman has been called an “outsider” artist, a folk artist, a primitive, a post-post-modernist, a master, a menace. The paintings are easy to read and, for many, nightmares difficult to forget. The subject is often violence and dementia, serial killers and cultural antiheroes, from Charles Manson to Hank Williams to Harry Houdini. They are rich with color and careful draftsmanship, showing touches of figurative Renaissance painting wrapped in the pop-pulp horror of EC Comics. And they are like American folk art in their fixation with details – dense with information, every available space crowded, nothing wasted.

Fear is very much on the minds of Americans in the post-9/11 world, but Coleman's work is a brutal reminder that fear has always been with us. Now it is functioning like a talisman or an encyclopedia. When a man's work has comprised unspeakable acts – paintings of autopsies, biting the heads off live mice, strapping explosives to his chest and blowing himself up in public (in a strange pre-figuration of Palestinian suicide bombings that would start years later) – it gives the unspeakable a dark language.

That darkness has not lifted, and yet there is a noticeable shift in some of Coleman's paintings from the past few years. This can be seen clearly in Love Song, a 1999 self-portrait with his new wife, the photographer Whitney Ward. She is a statuesque blonde in stiletto heels. They are holding hands. Coleman is smiling. And the paint itself is not nearly enough. So the panel is mounted onto a sheet lifted from their bed, and the frame is decorated with talismans containing samples of their blood and hair and fingernails. And a cyst removed from the painter's neck.

It is deeply personal and somehow hopeful, which is a new sensation for Coleman. “I think that's true,” he says now. “I don't feel quite as burdened. The world hasn't gotten better. If anything, the world has gotten worse. But, through dealing with it for so many years, I've gotten to a place where I'm kind of OK with that. Look at all the great stuff I got out of how fucked-up it is.”

Longtime friends can see it, even as they remember Coleman as desperately angry and haunted in his youth. A New York cabbie with no future, a painter with no gallery. “There was a point in Joe's life where there wasn't much love for humanity,” says publisher Adam Parfrey, owner of the Los Angeles-based Feral House, and a close friend to Coleman since meeting him in 1984 on the Lower East Side. “He's obviously in a different phase now, doing so well with Whitney. You see it. He's a happy person. He's a content person. He's a successful person. When I first knew Joe, that wasn't the case.”

Winning with Garbage

Coleman had been painting and drawing since he was a child in Connecticut, even being awarded a prize for his drawing of garbage at age 10 by Lady Bird Johnson, the president's wife. Two years later, he set fire to the schoolyard. His anger was fueled by a home life dominated by an alcoholic father and a mother who had been excommunicated from the Catholic church for marrying him. By the time he was a teenager, Coleman had already become known as a kind of prankster performance artist, strapping explosives to his chest to ignite unexpectedly at parties and public places. He became Professor Mombooze-o, the exploding bearded geek, who would also often bite the heads off live mice. The blasts were controlled chaos, but a disturbing, mind-shattering eruption of fire and smoke to anyone unprepared for it. Long after he'd established his career as a painter, Coleman was still blowing himself up regularly at parties and performances, up until his mother's death in 1989. He put Mombooze-o to rest, and he's rarely done it since.

Not that Coleman has abandoned his longtime interests. He's still a man with a passion for fringe historical figures. He still performs autopsies as a forensic hobbyist, and even uses an image of himself performing an autopsy in Hungary for his author photograph on The Book of Joe, his new collection of recent paintings. It is a picture of someone who appears to be in utter control, not horrified at all by the elderly woman under his knife and saw, hands grappling with her insides.

Meeting him and Ward over dinner during a weeklong trip to Los Angeles, Coleman doesn't seem a man traumatized by the past, but an artist at ease with the present. His methods must be working.

They have just finished a meeting at La Luz de Jesus, the Hollywood store and gallery that is also co-publisher of The Book of Joe. A restaurant is only a few steps away, and Coleman soon orders a glass of white wine. He's dressed in his usual black Victorian ensemble: long jacket, a tie, cowboy boots. His vest is covered with unique pins and ornaments, including one dangling the foot of his deceased cat, and another with the severed claw of a crocodile. A pocketwatch opens to display a photograph of Junior. Coleman smiles behind his beard, his mustache twirled into long, festive whiskers. The overall effect is the look of a 19th-century carnival barker or riverboat sharpie, maybe one played by a young Vincent Price. Ward sits beside him in elegant black, eyeing the menu carefully. Together they look just as they do in Love Song, which turned out to be a work too personal to part with.

Coleman has kept none of his early work, and even now has few recent paintings. Parting with them was never a problem before. But Ward was so alarmed that he had to buy it back. “I was just giving it to the person that was next on the list,” Coleman says with a shrug. “But she freaked out, and understandably so. But the person had already given me a deposit.

“The process of making it is what's really important to me, and it helps me deal with things. But once I've completed it, I want it to go out in the world, to maybe communicate. I want it to leave then. Whitney, on the other hand, doesn't want them to leave and wants to protect them. Because of that, I've decided to keep some that she really wants.”

Now, he says the painting belongs with them, with Junior and the wax figures of Nixon and Lenin. “It's a joyous painting, but it's also about fear of loss. Here I make it this thing I can hold onto, so that it won't go through my hands, and lose love.”

Loss is a recurring theme. Sometimes from within. The breakdown of the body and society, studies that are dark and rooted in horrible real events. In The Book of Joe, there is a self-portrait that recounts Coleman's recent medical challenges, struck with anaphylactic shock, causing his skin to erupt with painful red welts. I Am Joe's Fear of Disease presents a portrait of the artist as a medical specimen, dissecting his imperfect body via a cut-away image, showing his insides as merely meat and bone and unknowable germs. Just as disarming is The Big Bang Theory, which explores the dark lineage of explosives and other doomsday devices, mingling images from various atrocities with figures including A-Bomb scientist Robert Oppenheimer and Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh.

Among the most striking of his portraits is A Picture from Life's Other Side, an iconic exploration of Hank Williams. The darkness here is more subtle than his depictions of madmen and serial killers. This is focused on alcoholism and early death and fast, hard times. The painting takes its title from a Williams hillbilly lament and is a meditation on the lonesome blues, deeply felt by Coleman in the months before meeting Ward. He identified with Williams and his weakness for booze and sex and art, and drew on a jumble of images of Hank's time in jail, naked cowgirls, the influence of his contemporaries on what was already being called the devil's music. Coleman was a musician himself, an ex-member of art-noise band Steel Tips. That didn't make it easy. At some point during its creation, Coleman determined that Hank's face wasn't right, and nothing he could do would resolve the problem. So he punched Hank in the face, knocking the painting off the easel. Then he angrily sanded off the face. When Coleman painted it again, old Hank now had a smirk, a vague twist to his expression that better represented how the painter saw him.

“It's like he wanted me to haul off and punch him,” Coleman says. “Hank used to get into fights at his shows. He wanted it, to make it all come together. Painting has a life of its own, and you have to be open to that.”

That state of mind can lead to some visual somersaults and raw humor, not unlike the painter Robert Williams, who began his career with the groundbreaking underground Zap Comix. Both artists share some visual techniques, but little in subject matter. Both have an interest in early comic art that can still be seen within their paintings, but at the service of vastly different obsessions. Williams is often playful, bizarre, disturbed in a different way, focused on chicks and cars, tacos and paranoia, with an almost psychedelic exaggeration to what he has called his “super-cartoons.” Coleman finds his inspiration in American monsters, finding enough empathy for the likes of Charles Manson that the jailed murderer responded in a letter: “His art is something else. Praise! Praise! Praise! He's a caveman in a space ship.”

“He has this authentically nihilistic point of view,” says Gary Groth, editor of Comics Journal and publisher of Fantagraphics Books, which co-published Coleman's Cosmic Retribution with Feral House in 1992. “He has an original and unique vision and outsider perceptions that I liked. Most of the alternative cartoonists' work is not detail-oriented like his is. But he still somehow manages to retain the cartoony quality to his line. He does incorporate some degree of exaggeration in his work.”

Williams himself, who has known Coleman for about 15 years, says, “Joe is still not scared to paint what he wants to paint. And if you look at most of the young artists now, most of their stuff is timid and cute, non-offensive, an attempt to be quite marketable. And Joe is on the side of the fence with me, where we're still expressive. We're not held back by worrying about what people think.

“Not only do you get a remarkably well done piece of art with Joe Coleman, but you get a brilliant interpretation of history of whatever subject he would like to express. I could slobber on about him for hours.”

Coleman most often sells directly to collectors now, a mixture of art patrons and celebrities with a weakness for the paintings. So he0 rarely shows in galleries, leaving the broader public to discover his work through books and posters. But the early years were tough, even to convince a gallery owner to see his work. Collectors were often repulsed by the content. “Some of my biggest collectors told me, the first time they saw one of my paintings they hated it with a passion. Then they couldn't stop thinking about it.”

His patrons must wait their turns now. Coleman's paintings are sold even before they are finished, typically commanding $50,000 each.

Outside the Outside

But it was still a bizarre event this year when he found himself banished from the annual Outsider Art Fair in New York's Soho district. Coleman had shown there for 10 years and been openly embraced. Then he was barred, ejected from the ´´ society of mostly unschooled savants, because, he was told, of the two and a half years he studied (unhappily) at the School of Visual Arts in the '70s. Which apparently now makes him an insider.

An insider who's done everything imaginable to ruin his chances, socially and commercially. He's no art-schmoozer. Over lunch, he can still recount with fresh amazement an infamous prank from 1980, when he posed as “Doug Sprag,” a man celebrating his 10-year high school reunion. Coleman didn't know Sprag, who'd actually been killed in a car crash. But he walked into this stranger's reunion, a dead ringer for Sprag, to the shock of his classmates. Just as they started to ask questions, he blew himself up, then disappeared.

It was the ultimate prank, both cruel and unusual, a total psychological victory.

“People think that I'm brave – like it's brave to blow yourself up, or bite the heads off rats, or do an autopsy, or do these kinds of paintings,” Coleman says. “It's not brave. It's scared. I'm scared of not dealing with it. If I don't, the consequences are much worse.

“I was a very fearful child. But that made me more compelled to look. I lived across the street from a cemetery. I used to be afraid of the cemetery. When I was real little, I would get across the street to the stone wall, and I would put one foot down, and I would have to run back home. The next day, I would get two feet in and run back. After time went on, I was all the way in the cemetery and got to look at the headstones and stuff. Fear motivates that. In that fear is also excitement. It's passion.

“You're going to go back to your normal world where everything's fine?”

A Freak-Show Wedding

The wedding to Whitney Ward was like one of his paintings. Epic, strange, inventive, overloaded with detail, scandalous, memorable. So it is fitting that the event is given an entire chapter in Coleman's new book. It happened in 2000 at the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore, unfolding like another performance piece, with an entourage that included trapeze artists, midgets, a sword-swallower, guests in bunny suits, and women in pasties and little else. The guest list also included such underground figures and strong stomachs as director John Waters and musician Kembra Pfahler (of the Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black). Coleman arrived in a Victorian wicker coffin, carried into the room by pallbearers. Junior attended in an antique baby carriage. Ward wore green. The ceremony was officiated by a ventriloquist's dummy, and Joe finally declared, “My life is the best of any human being who ever fucking lived!”

Actress Asia Argento was there. The daughter of Italian horror maestro Dario Argento cast Coleman in her film Scarlet Diva, directing the painter in a role originally written, she said, with Marlon Brando in mind. It was a small but vivid part as Barry Parr, a sleazy movie producer who gropes and strips poor Asia before she escapes, as Coleman stomps naked and grunting down the hallway behind her in his cowboy boots.

He missed the 9/11 terrorist attacks, which unfolded so close to his apartment in Brooklyn Heights. He and Whitney were at the opening of his exhibition at the Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art. When all the planes were grounded, Coleman and Ward drove their rental car back to New York, stopping at all the best roadside attractions on the way.

In Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, they were in search of the high-speed roller coaster when they saw a huge sign reading: “WAX MUSEUM.” When they arrived, a sign said the museum was closed indefinitely. Coleman looked inside the windows and saw that the figures were still there, so he found the owner, who was eager to unload his aging wax figures. It was a fantasy for Coleman, a classic chamber of horrors: one display depicted a monster party, with vampires and zombies and the wolfman as your butler. “Primitive,” he says, “but it was so full of charm.”

They brought it all home, though much has to remain in storage. Coleman's obsession as a collector is insatiable, rooted partly in the example of Forrest J Ackerman, the publisher of Famous Monsters of Filmland and Creepy and Vampirella. Forrey collected props and masks from the great films of science fiction and horror, going back to 1927's Metropolis. Coleman's interests are more earthbound, perhaps, looking for artifacts of real murder and bizarre human behavior and deformity. Not fiction. The better to continue confronting the traumas he knew as a child.

His paintings are a way to confront what he shares with his nightmarish collection. “For a lot of people, it would be easy to see a still life or some other nice conceptual art. But those things don't compel me to try to make sense of them. The painful and disturbing things compel me to try to calm my fears of it. A painting is a way of controlling my fears. Collecting is often the same kind of motivation, too. You own a piece of murder in order to not be murdered. If you paint your traumas, it's painting your way out.”

There are always new fears to consider. One recent work, As You Look Into the Eye of the Cyclops, So the Eye of the Cyclops Looks Into You, is a painting mounted onto an old television cabinet, gathering many of the nightmarish and alluring scenes Coleman has witnessed on television. Murder, sex, suicide, low-speed chases, cartoons, the Little Rascals, Joan Collins. The TV painting also has a soundtrack created by Coleman that can be flipped on with the TV knobs, as a fluorescent light gives the painting an electric glow. It took a year of work and research to complete.

The painting was inspired by his experience on 9/11. The towers outside his house came crashing down. And he watched it on television like the rest of the world. He expects more trouble. “Yeah, it can happen at any moment. You can have a dirty bomb going off right in central Manhattan, and one day it's probably going to happen. In fact, I guarantee it's going to happen, because we've created the ability for someone to do it. It's like the old Frankenstein movies: You tamper with God's laws, and you have to pay the price.

“But the other side of it is: So what? You can walk out of here right now and accidentally a truck runs over you and wipes you out of existence. That's the world. That's what it means to be alive. But I think we should be honest about it. Suck it up and go on. And don't be fooled by fucking assholes that try to tell you who the enemy is. The enemy is right here.”

Meanwhile, he'll be back at the Odditorium, admiring his collection, painting slowly and precisely. And wondering sometimes how he managed to survive and thrive.

“Here I'm a guy that's bit the head off of rats, blowing myself up with explosives, doing all these things. All these things that should be the worst possible thing that a person can do … if somebody else did it, it would be the worst thing for their life. They would be in prison or dead. But I trusted something inside that this was the right thing for me. In spite of all those things, I flourish. That's the biggest surprise, that the worst thing about me is the best thing. I made it work for me.”