[Servalan]

Noch einer, für den eigentlich nur ein Beleg fehlte.

William S. Burroughs, einer der Köpfe der Beat-Generation, Autor von Naked Lunch und der Nova-Trilogie. Schuf 1970 mit dem Künstler Malcolm McNeill ein 120-seitiges Comicwerk.

In 1970, William S. Burroughs and artist Malcolm McNeill began a small collaborative project on a comic entitled The Unspeakable Mr. Hart, which appeared in the first four issues of Cyclops, England’s first comics magazine for an adult readership. Soon after, Burroughs and McNeill agreed to collaborate on a book-length meditation on time, power, and control, and corruption that evoked the Mayan codices and specifically, the Mayan god of death, Ah Pook. Ah Pook is Here was to include their character Mr. Hart, but stray from the conventional comics form to explore different juxtapositions of images and words. Ah Pook was never finished in its intended form. In a 1979 prose collection that included only the words from the collaboration, Ah Pook is Here and Other Texts (Calder, 1979), Burroughs explains in the preface that they envisioned the work to be “one that falls into neither the category of the conventional illustrated book nor that of a comix publication.” Rather, the work was to include “about a hundred pages of artwork with text (thirty in full-color) and about fifty pages of text alone.” The book was conceived as a single painting in which text and images were combined in whatever form seemed appropriate to the narrative. It was conceived as 120 continuous pages that would ‘fold out.’ Such a book was, at the time, unprecedented, and no publisher was willing to take a chance and publish a “graphic novel.”