h POOK IS HERE was a collaboration between author William S. Burroughs and artist Malcolm McNeill, begun in 1970, when Burroughs was 56 and living in London and McNeill (23) was in his final year of art school. Oddly, Mc Neill had barely heard of Burroughs, let alone read any of his books. “The fact that I knew nothing about him before I met him was certainly my greatest asset.” Mc Neill writes. “If I’d had any sense of his formidable intellect, or his intense personal history, I would have been intimidated to say the least. […] Apart from the age disparity and the unprecedented nature of his writing, he embodied an extreme persona for which I had no frame of reference at all: an avowed homosexual heroin addict, who’d shot and killed his wife, then essentially abandoned their only child. [This was] a scenario in which none of the elements were familiar, much less made sense. […] The need to try and make them so, however, was irresistible.”
The work first appeared in four parts under the title “The Unspeakable Mr. Hart” as a comic strip in the English magazine Cyclops, the “First English Adult Comic Paper.” Although the fourth part states “To be continued” at the end, four is all that were produced before Cyclops ceased publication, and Burroughs and McNeill decided to develop the concept as a book. After a year of research and preliminary design the text of the book had expanded from 11 pages to 50, and a complete mockup had been produced. By this point, the work had been renamed “Ah Puch Is Here” in reference to the Mayan Death God. Straight Arrow Books in San Francisco agreed to publish the proposed work in 1971 as a “Word/Image novel” which was to comprise 120 pages, some of integrated text and image, some of text alone and some which featured only pictures.
In 1973, McNeill moved to San Francisco from London to finish the project. However, the small advance proffered by the publisher made any more than a few months of working full-time on the project impossible, and when Straight Arrow closed in 1974 the book was without a publisher. Nevertheless, McNeill moved toNew York in 1975 to rejoin Burroughs and continue the work. The book was conceived as a single painting in which text and images were combined in whatever form seemed appropriate to the narrative. ” Such a book was, at the time, unprecedented, and no publisher was willing to take a chance and publish a “graphic novel.” After collaborating on it for 7 years, Burroughs and McNeill finally abandoned the project that was subsequently published in text form only in 1979 (by John Calder and Viking Penguinn).
After 30 years the original visual works were resurrected and restored by McNeill for a showing in New York (2008) and in Santa Monica, CA (2008 ); in September 2010, at last, Fantagraphics Books has announced the acquisition of this lost masterpiece, that will be published in the summer of 2011 as a spectacularly packaged two-volume, hinged set.
The second book in the set is Observed While Falling, written by Malcolm McNeill, an account of the personal and creative interaction that defined the collaboration between the writer and the artist, the events surrounding it, and the reasons for its ultimate demise. McNeill describes his growing friendship with Burroughs and how their personal relationship affected their creative partnership. The book is written with insight and humor, and liberally sprinkled with the kind of the hilarious anecdotes one would expect working with a writer as original and eccentric as William S. Burroughs. It confirms the prescience of Ah Pook Is Here with respect to the contemporary graphic novel; Burroughs’ exploration of the artistic potential of combining words and images was a revelation to the artist. The book offers new insights into Burroughs’ working methods as well as how the two explored the possibilities of words and images working together to form the ambitious literary hybrid that they didn’t know, at the time, was a harbinger of the 21st century’s “graphic novel.”
