7 Miles a Second is the acclaimed comics autobiography of legendary artist David Wojnarowicz; it traces his youth through to his AIDS-related death in 1992; the artwork is by Wojnarowicz’s collaborators James Romberger and Marguerite Van Cook. The graphic memoir depicts Wojnarowicz's childhood of prostitution and homelessness on the streets of Manhattan and his adult rage at the inaction of government and health agencies about the AIDS epidemic. First published in 1996 by DC's Vertigo Comics, 7 Miles a Second became a cult classic of the graphic novel. It was reissued in hardcover by Fantagraphics Books in 2012 as it was originally intended: oversized and with Van Cook's intense watercolors restored. This new 8.5 X 11” glossy paperback edition is a significant improvement as it displays the color at full intensity.
“A revelatory work of art... Romberger renders Wojnarowicz’s moments of delirium and violent frustration as well as interludes of tenderness and passionate attachment.” —Art in America
“The rough and seedy style of Romberger’s illustrations provides a perfect foil for Wojnarowicz’s text. Seven Miles a Second veers between an almost unbearably gritty naturalism and the incendiary heat of surrealist hallucination.” —The New Yorker
“A cult classic... both a celebration of the unlimited potential of the comic book form, and a perfect melding of inspiring, iconoclastic imaginations.” —Jim Jarmusch
“Revolutionary.... a runaway, over-the-top circus... An excursion into areas few, if any, comics creators have tread.” —Jim Steranko
“<7 Miles a Second> is punk as f**k, colored in the tones of every kind of acid, and filled with rage, against the indifference of people in general and the naked disgust those in power had for homosexuals dying of AIDS in the early 1990s, when to be diagnosed was to be given a death sentence. It is an immediate work, an attempt to communicate before death that did not win its race against time.” —Brian Nicholson, Bookslut
68 page full color paperback Ground Zero Books, 2018
