I’ve always thought William S. Burroughs’s novels would make brilliant 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 called The Unspeakable Mr. Hart. They published excerpts of their collaboration in the first four issues of the underground comix periodical Cyclops. They also planned a book-length graphic narrative tentatively titled Ah Pook Is Here, though they never completed the project, or at least not in the form initially intended. Burroughs published the stand-alone text with Viking in 1979, and it wasn’t until Fantagraphics Books published Observed While Falling and The Lost Art of Ah Pook Is Here, both in 2012, that the illustrations were made available to readers.
Yet scattered gems remain throughout the archive. For example, I recently came across this image by artist Paul Mavrides, co-creator of The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers. It accompanies an excerpt of Burroughs’s unpublished novella The Revised Boyscout Manual in the 1982 issue of RE/Search, which was dedicated to the work of Burroughs, Brion Gysin, and the punk band Throbbing Gristle. Burroughs originally conceived of The Revised Boyscout Manual as a part of his novel The Wild Boys, but he eventually decided to revise it into a stand-alone narrative. It’s not as aggressively bizarre as many of his other fictions, but it’s still an interesting, highly political work that provides an important context for his other fictions of the period.
I like Mavrides’s illustration. The appalling hybrid human/insect face framed by anemone-like tentacles captures something of Burroughs’s interest in the human as biological organism, an animal species prone to viruses and caught in the flux of evolution. It is appropriately uncanny and leaves me wishing Mavrides had illustrated more of Burroughs’s work. Unfortunately, this is the only example I’m aware of, though I’m hopeful there are similar works I haven’t yet discovered.
If you know of any other illustrations of Burroughs’s writing, whether by Mavrides or anyone else, please share in the comments thread. Potential leads will be much appreciated.
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Note:
The title of the post is taken from William S. Burroughs, “From The Revised Boyscout Manual,” RE/Search, vol. 4/5, 1982, p. 8.
Image:
Mavrides, Paul. Untitled Illustration. RE/Search, vol. 4/5, 1982, p. 7.
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(CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) 2017 Micah Robbins