Howl: A Graphic Novel

In publishing Howl, I was curious to leave behind after my generation an emotional time bomb taht would continue exploding in U.S. consciousness, in case our militarty-industrial-nationalist complext solidified into a repressive police bureaucracy/ I was also curious to see how (Eric Drooker) would interepret my work.- And I though that with todays lowered attention span TV consciousness, this would be a kind of updating of the presentation of my work . . . To me, the megalopolis landscapes are the most interesting - that gigantic skyscraper vision.- he really captured that sense of Moloch I was going for in the second section of Howl - Moloch whose buildings are judgment! I began collecting Drookers posters soon after overcoming shock, seeing in contemporary images the same dangerious class conflict Id remembered from childhood, pre-Hitler block print wordless novels . . . to solitary artist dwarfed by the canyons of a Wall Street megalopolis lay shadowed behind my own vision of Moloch . . . What shocked me in Drookers scratchboard prints was his graphic illustration of economic crisis similar to Weiman-American 1930s Depressions . . . Drooker illustrated the citys infrastructural stress, housing decay, homelessness, garbage-hunger, and bitter suffering of marginalized families, Blacks and youth, with such vivid detail that the authoritarian reality horror of our contemporary dog-eat-dog Malthusian technoeconomic class-war becamse immediately visible . . . As Id followed his work over a decade, I was flattered taht so radical an artist of later generations found the body of my poetry still relevant, even inspiring.- Out paths crossed often . . . - ALLEN GINSBERG