Untitled, from the portfolio Seven Miles a Second

This print excerpts an autobiographical comic written by artist David Wojnarowicz during the last years of his life, before his death from AIDS-related complications in 1992. Unfinished when he died,Seven Miles a Second was a collaboration between Wojnarowicz, a self-taught, multi-disciplinary artist and gay activist; James Romberger, who drew the comic; and colorist Marguerite Van Cook. The title comes from a line in Wojnarowicz’s 1988 essay “Post cards from America: X-Rays from Hell,” which embodies his anger at the deadly lack of response to the AIDS epidemic in America. “The minimum speed required to break through the earth’s gravitational pull is seven miles a second,” he wrote, and “we would have to learn to run awful fast to achieve escape from where we are heading.”