William S. Burroughs’ Lost Graphic Novel Ah Pook Is Here Gets Exhumed

Naked Lunch author and sci-fi visionary William S. Burroughs only wrote one graphic novel, but it quickly disappeared after bouncing around in the early ’70s. Now the long-lost book, Ah Pook Is Here, has been reborn with the help of indie comics standout Fantagraphics.

Fantagraphics will publish the resuscitated Ah Pook as a two-volume package next summer, no doubt to the delight of Beat-nuts and alt-lit loyalists worldwide.

Burroughs‘ collaboration with artist Malcolm McNeill on Ah Pook was ahead of its time in the late ’60s and early ’70s, back when the phrase “graphic novel” was merely a figment of some marketer’s imagination. Yet the story — about a filthy-rich newspaper tycoon who creates a Media Control Machine fueled by ancient Mayan images to achieve immortality in the midst of a plague-riddled apocalypse — reads like a monstrous offspring of Fox News.

William S. Burroughs mutated psy-fi and sci-fi in novels like Naked Lunch and Nova Express. But did he create, with artist Malcolm McNeill, one of the first graphic novels in Ah Pook Is Here?
Image courtesy Christiaan Tonnis/Wikipedia

Fantagraphics describes the tale like this:

John Stanley Hart is the “Ugly American” or “Instrument of Control” — a billionaire newspaper tycoon obsessed with discovering the means for achieving immortality. Based on the formulae contained in rediscovered Mayan books he attempts to create a Media Control Machine using the images of Fear and Death. By increasing Control, however, he devalues time and invokes an implacable enemy: Ah Pook, the Mayan Death God. Young mutant heroes using the same Mayan formulae travel through time bringing biologic plagues from the remote past to destroy Hart and his Judeo/Christian temporal reality.

The story originated in the ’70s as a monthly comic strip called The Unspeakable Mr. Hart in English magazine Cyclops. When the mag went belly up, Burroughs and McNeil attempted to develop Ah Pook into a unique book. It was originally designed to be a single painting featuring recombined images and text, packed in 120 serial pages that would unfurl as the narrative took shape. That arty ambition doomed it to a later millennium, where an evolved comics industry could handle the work’s innovation and experimentation.

Ah Pook Is Here was another distillation of the cut-up technique, popularized by Burroughs and Brion Gysin, that anticipated later massive media developments like sampling and mashups. Burroughs died in 1997.

Fantagraphics’ release includes accompanying book Observed While Falling, McNeill’s memoir about his seven-year collaboration with Burroughs, one of America’s most influential authors. Acquired by publisher and editor Gary Groth, Ah Pook Is Here is a feather in Fantagraphics’ already feather-stufffed comics-lit cap.

“Fantagraphics is honored to bring this major work into print and to publish what is quite possibly the last great work from one of America’s most original prose stylists,” Groth said in a press release Thursday. “Burroughs once said that, ‘The purpose of writing is to make it happen.’ We are proud to make Ah Pook Is Here finally happen.”

William S. Burroughs and Malcolm McNeill's graphic novel Ah Pook Is Here arrives summer 2011.
Images courtesy Fantagraphics
Scott Thill @'Underwire'

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