Fantagraphics Acquires William Burroughs’s Lost Graphic Novel

In Summer 2011, Fantagraphics will release Ah Pook Is Here, the lost graphic novel by William Burroughs and artist Malcolm McNeill. The publisher is going to bundle it with McNeill’s unpublished memoir of the collaboration Observed While Falling.

This is really fucking cool.

Burroughs and McNeill worked on the book in the early-to-mid-70s, well before anyone knew what a graphic novel was.The format is completely different from what you’d normally expect–while it combines images and text, it doesn’t do so within typical confines of word balloons or captions. It was also designed as 120 continuous fold-out pages.

The original publisher folded and Burroughs and McNeill jettisoned the Ah Pook Is Here after seven years of work. Given the project’s ambitions, Burroughs and McNeill had a hard time placing the book. But if you happen to have $100 to blow, you can buy the text-only version of the Ah Pook Is Here, published in 79.

My first exposure to Ah Pook happened when my dad took me to Spike & Mike’s Sick and Twisted Festival of Animation and I saw a short film of the work, which uses Burroughs’s recording.

Because I was only 13 or 14 at the time, Ah Pook only left a minor impression on me. I was more interested in the cartoons that were essentially five-minute dick jokes.

Anyway.

So what is Ah Pook about? From Fantagraphics’s release:

Ah Pook Is Here is a consideration of time with respect to the differing perceptions of the ancient Maya and that of the current Western mindset. It was Burroughs’ contention that both of these views result in systems of control in which the elite perpetuate its agendas at the expense of the people. They make time for themselves and through increasing measures of Control attempt to prolong the process indefinitely.

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.