Tom's taste for police officers and criminals, and the sexual tension between them, was born in the last years of his career. “I have never been to jail,” he said in a class at the California Institute of the Arts in 1985, “but I have been told that it is a closed world where there are different roles and people behave differently than they do in freedom. It fascinates me. It is another subject that I keep addressing again and again.” With this, Tom confirmed that he kept fantasizing about it repeatedly, since he only included in his works what sexually excited him.

The uniforms of the California Highway Patrol motorcyclists were his favorites: cinnamon color and tight, with tall boots and soft black leather gloves. The artist designed his own variants of such uniforms, a mix of military and police attire, and created tough criminals but ones the officers could catch, although it is true that, once caught, the power struggle could tilt either way. Tom was determined to show everything while representing male roles equally, and it was just as likely that his police officers would end up happily impaled on a criminal’s penis as inflicting a punishment coitus. Criticized by some who considered his work a glorification of power, Tom was quick to remind that the world he created was fantasy, where everything was possible and consensual, even in prison.

The Little Book of Tom: Cops & Robbers explores Tom’s fascination with the world of justice and crime through a combination of comic strips, drawings, and full-page illustrations in a compact and affordable 192-page format. The selection of frames and posters from historic films, personal photographs and sketches by Tom, as well as the artist’s own reference images, make this book much more than a review of his comics.