In 1970, William Burroughs was living in London. While there, he collaborated with young English artist Malcolm McNeill on a comic series for a magazine called Cyclops. The series was called The Unspeakable Mr. Hart, and remains uncollected/reprinted to date. Too bad, because it looks like really cool stuff. We got these images via The Virtual Library’s Beats collection, where there’s a really cool interview with McNeill (he discusses Burroughs habit of “going to movies to admire hard-ons and talking about them all afternoon,” which is kinda hilarious):


After Cylcops went kaput, Burroughs and McNeill continued the story in a project called Ah Pook Is Here, (a reference to the Mayan death god). Ah Pook Is Here, unfinished, was collected in the early eighties in Ah Pook Is Here and Other Texts which unfortunately is out of print. And very expensive. (Feel free to send it to me, anyone).

Fortunately, we can at least get a peek at some of McNeil’s hellish art at burroughsmcneillart.com. A few Boschian samples



Again, we want this book. Please send us this book. In the meantime, filmmaker Philip Hunt made this 1994 6 minute animated short of Ah Pook Is Here:
[…] Burroughs did, at one point, collaborate with artist Malcolm McNeill on a project called The Unspeakable Mr. Hart, a graphic narrative serially published in the British comics magazine Cyclops. They also planned […]
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[…] illustrated texts, but illustrators have largely overlooked his work. The one notable exception is Malcolm McNeill, a British artist who collaborated with Burroughs in the early 1970s on a project ca…. They published portions of their collaboration in the first four issues of the underground comix […]
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