It is customary, I think, for critics reviewing a new comics anthology to interpret the collection as a cohesive statement on the medium’s present moment, or at least the state of a scene: what aesthetics, whose voices, what themes, anxieties, stories, visual and narrative structures will carry the form into uncharted, exciting terrain? In a sense, A.B.O. Comix: A Queer Prisoner’s Anthology Volume 4 offers a comment on the future of the comics medium, but its intentions are different. The anthology is a collective manifesto of abolition and intersectional queer liberation composed of contributions by incarcerated queer people in the United States, predominantly in Texas, where institutional transphobia and negligent COVID protocols have made life incredibly harsh for inmates. The goal of the anthology is pragmatic -- all profits from the book go to the incarcerated queer folks who contribute to the anthology, while the space of the anthology itself provides a platform for their artistic voices, voices that are constantly and violently silenced by the oppressive apparatus of the state and white supremacy. It is a collection of comics drawn by any means available to tell stories from the lives and imaginations of people living under multiple axes of marginalization and oppressed under the unrelentingly immoral weight of the American penal system.
Many stories in the anthology are didactic or autobiographical, told with the intention of educating the reader of the lived conditions of inmates and the artists’ own experiences with incarceration. Many are unrelentingly bleak, honest, portraits -- Leandra Anderson’s “Transgender in T.D.C.J.” depicts with ruthlessly blunt efficiency how prison regulations lead a transgender woman in a men’s prison to suicide, while Joanna Nixon’s comic tableaus provide vivid scenes of prison life amid the COVID pandemic. Other stories are heartfelt, humorous, and optimistic -- the formation of transformative sexual and romantic relationships behind bars is a recurrent theme, as is solidarity between queer, black and trans inmates. Many of the contributors to A.B.O. Comix are black gay men and transgender women whose perspectives are often marginalized in any queer community, depicted frequently while rarely represented by their own voices. A lot of political and personal information makes its way into this anthology that readers are unlikely to find anywhere else. As a whole, it’s a portrait of the prison population that statistics already tell us is true yet still lies outside of our imagination when we picture “prison.” These aren’t the prison queers that even our more compassionate storytellers might render as a politicized fetish; here, the artists are speaking for themselves.
Other stories are flights of fancy, defiant indulgences in imagination, proud displays of fetish, dreams of collective freedom and liberation. Fantasies of prisons destroyed and inmates freed, homophobes and fascists reformed by love or defeated by scrappy collectives of incarcerated homosexuals abound. Superheroes bust through concrete walls, anime girls and fursonas go on adventures in and out of prison. However, the very dichotomy I have set for the purposes of this essay between fantasy and reality, present and future, crumbles as well before the perspectives which many contributors bring to their work. In an anthology which proudly displays the works of furries, otherkin, witches, occultists and plural people, allonormative categories like “fiction” or “realism” may not have much use.
The comics in A.B.O. Comix 4 are drawn by any means necessary, any means permitted. For the most part, those means are pencil and pencil crayon, although occasionally crayons, markers and pens make an appearance. The anthology is not lacking in admirable craft: contributions by Jamie Diaz, Joanna Nixon, Metro and G. Wyatt in particular stood out to me as meticulously drafted. But this is not an anthology about craft; craft would be an exclusionary metric in this context. Styles range from disciplined to naive, not always crude or unpracticed but often outside the range of illustration considered meritable by critical establishment. Artwork influenced by “How to Draw Manga-Style” books noticeably abounds. At times, I am reminded of Peanuts Minus Schultz, another recent anthology which pushed the boundaries of voices included in a curated comics publication. However, unlike Ilan Manouach’s provocative outsourcing project, it is clear that the contributors to A.B.O. Comix feel compelled to draw comics with or without the platform and support A.B.O. provides, marginalized artists obsessed with the lives of their original superheroes or their fursonas, their comrades and their lovers, graffiti maestros without spray paint driven to create by a love of art and a need for liberation.
Reading A.B.O. Comix 4, I was reminded at times of the early days of webcomics, long since gentrified into oblivion, when there seemed to be a bottomless well of self-published strips and serials by people motivated by a hyperpersonal, marginal need to have a comic of their own. When we ask where these comics went, the answers given are usually the close-to-accurate observation that old websites are lost and consolidated social media makes exploration more difficult, but the reality is that less strange webcomics exist now because more people are impoverished and imprisoned than ever, and so visible “outsider” art has dwindled in the absence of time and access. There has not been an anthology in recent memory as aesthetically diverse, politically cogent and firmly rooted in contemporary counterculture as A.B.O. Comix 4. It’s an anthology that demands to be read, an ideal and a cause that demands support. As readers of comics, we frequently talk amongst ourselves about what comics ought to be. If the medium has any sort of power whatsoever, it will be the power to liberate the artists whose words and pictures reach us in the pages of A.B.O. Comix. Any regular reader of The Comics Journal without a well-read copy of this book on their shelf is a coward.
