The Little Book of Tom. Cops & Robbers

The Little Book of Tom. Cops & Robbers delves into Tom's late career fascination with police officers and felons, exploring the sexual tension between the two. "I've never been to prison," Tom shared with a class at the California Institute of the Arts in 1985, "but I hear it's a closed world where there are different roles and people behave differently from when they walk free. It fascinates me. It is another subject I come back to again and again." These subjects that sexually aroused him were the ones he continuously returned to in his art.

The uniforms of the California Highway Patrol motorcyclists were his favourite: tan and tight, with high boots and soft black leather gauntlet gloves. Tom also created his own uniform variants, blending military and civilian police gear, and invented suitably butch criminals for his cops to apprehend. Once apprehended, the power struggle could go either way. Tom was determined to portray both top and bottom as equally masculine roles, and his cops were as likely to end up happily speared by criminal cock as delivering corrective coitus. Despite criticisms of glorifying power, Tom consistently emphasised that his world was purely fantasy, where everything was possible and consensual—even in prison.

The Little Book of Tom: Cops & Robbers explores Tom's fascination with criminal justice through a mixture of multi-panel comics and single-panel drawings and paintings. This compact and affordable book of 192 pages includes historic film stills and posters, personal photos of Tom, sketches, and his own reference photos, making it far more than a simple retread of Tom's previous works.