Ah Pook is Here
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Ah Pook is Here began as a collaboration between author William Burroughs and artist Malcolm Mc Neill in 1970. Burroughs was living in London at that time and Mc Neill was in his final year of art school. It appeared first under the title The Unspeakable Mr. Hart as a 'comic strip' in the English magazine Cyclops. When the paper folded, Burroughs and Mc Neill decided to continue the idea in book form.
After a year of research and preliminary design the text had expanded from 11 to 50 pages and a complete mockup of the book had been produced. It was renamed Ah Puch is Here after the Maya Death God. In 1971, Straight Arrow Books in San Francisco agreed to publish the proposed work: a 120 page, "Word/Image novel" comprising pages of integrated text and image, pages of text alone and pages that were entirely pictorial.
In 1973 Mc Neill moved from London to San Francisco to complete the project. A minimal advance made working full-time impossible beyond a few months, and when Straight Arrow closed in 1974 the book was without a publisher. In 1975, Mc Neill nevertheless moved to New York to rejoin Burroughs and continue the work. Another publisher was unable to be found and after seven years on and off, the project was finally abandoned. It was subsequently published in text form only as Ah Pook is Here in 1979.
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