The Guardian.

A quest for immortality, the Mayan Death God and a billionaire newspaper tycoon: William Burroughs's only venture into graphic novels, abandoned almost 40 years ago, is set to be published in its entirety for the first time next year.

The Naked Lunch author began work on Ah Pook Is Here with artist Malcolm McNeill in 1970, when the story appeared as a monthly comic strip in the English magazine Cyclops. After the magazine folded, they worked to develop the concept into into a full-length book, which they dubbed a "Word/Image novel" because the term graphic novel had yet to be coined. But no publisher was interested, and after working on the book for seven years the pair eventually abandoned it.

Now American comics publisher Fantagraphics Books, home to titles by authors including R Crumb and Charles Schulz, has acquired rights in the book and will publish it next summer, describing it as "the kind of extrapolative, futuristic feat of imagination that a reader would expect from the author of Nova Express and The Ticket That Exploded — a mind-boggling tour de force, dramatising outré theories with a science fiction patina".

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