Big score for Seattle’s Fantagraphics: Next summer it will publish Ah Pook Is Here, a graphic novel from the 1970s by Burroughs and artist Malcolm McNeill. Begun as a comic strip titled The Unspeakable Mr. Hartt in the London magazine Cyclops, Burroughs and MacNeil extended it into a novel of 120 pages that folds out into a single scroll painting with text inserted.
No takers from the publishing world. (In the 1970s, the term “graphic novel” was not yet in use to signify a word/image combo, and the project was considered uncommercially weird.) After seven years of effort, Burroughs and McNeill gave up on it.
Burroughs was 56 when they met, McNeill 23.
McNeill:
In the first meeting he’d introduced me to the Reactive Mind, Reichs’
Orgone theories, Randolph Hearst, “Nigger Killing” sheriffs, Mugwumps,
the CIA, the Algebra of Need and a whole lot of other stuff I knew next
to nothing about. I knew right away I was in at the deep-end, but of
what, I had no idea. In time I realized I’d even got that wrong. ‘Deep’
in conventional space/time orientation implies that there’s some kind of
bottom. (more)
Below, from Ah Pook, a “tornado of vigilantes sweeps up from the bible belt.”
Jan Hermann on the influence of The Unspeakable Mr. Hartt here.
Big thanks for the shout out.