Fantagraphics to publish lost William S. Burroughs graphic novel

As someone who spent a goodly portion of the night of his junior prom listening to a Psychic TV song consisting of little more than a repeated sample of Burroughs saying “Boys — school showers and swimming pools full of ‘em” over and over again, I cannot WAIT for this: Fantagraphics has acquired Ah Pook Is Here, Beat legend William S. Burroughs’s long-lost proto-graphic-novel collaboration with British artist Malcolm McNeil.

Expanded from a collaborative comic strip that came to an end when the magazine in which it was published folded, then abandoned when no publishers of the time were willing to take the risk of publishing something in the then-unheard-of format, Pook is the story of John Stanley Hart, a William Randolph Hearst-like figure who attempts to utilize ancient Mayan science to achieve immortality and thus unleashes the fury of Ah Pook, Mayan god of death. The book will come packaged with Observed While Falling, McNeil’s prose memoir of his collaboration with the hugely influential author of such books as The Naked Lunch, Junky and Queer. For Fantagraphics’s full press release and a gallery of impressive art from the project, click here.