Tradecraft: Titan Announces New PRISONER Comic Book

Unpublished art by Gil Kane, inked by
Steve Leialoha 

Patrick McGoohan's iconic Sixties ITC series The Prisoner has been returning in a lot of different mediums lately. Big Finish did a surprisingly good job with their audio adventures, which are not so much sequel, remake, or reboot as an alternate version of the original story. The less said about AMC's 2009 miniseries version, the better. Now Titan Comics have announced a new Prisoner comic book. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the comic will be out next year with Peter Milligan (X-Statix, Hellblazer, Human Target) writing and Colin Lorimar (The X-Files) illustrating. While The Prisoner celebrated the 50th anniversary of its UK debut last week, the comic will be timed to coincide with the 50th anniversary of its American broadcast. It won't be set in the Sixties and it won't focus on McGoohan's iconoclastic Number 6; instead it will be a contemporary continuation of the original story, focusing on Number 6's modern-day successor. I first became a fan of Milligan's on his controversial run on X-Force (which became X-Statix), a twisted, surreal, and highly irreverent approach to a beloved property that in my mind makes him the perfect scribe for a modern-day Prisoner comic. "For a story where all is ambiguous," he told the trade, "it’s hardly surprising that everyone takes from The Prisoner something different. Like most people I had my own theories, my own twisted notions – mostly Kafkaesque and existential — of what was really going on in those mock Italianate dwellings. Personally, the stranger and more baffling it was, the better it suited me."

The Prisoner will fit well in Titan Comics' impressive roster of iconic British brands. The company currently has licences to publish comics based on Doctor Who, Sherlock, and Hammer horror (I encourage all Brian Clemens fans to seek out their new Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter comic!), among other popular UK-based TV and movie properties. Wouldn't it be fantastic if The Prisoner proves successful enough to lead to comic book revivals of other ITC classics?!

This is far from the first Prisoner comic book. The most famous adaptation to that medium may be one that was sadly never published, the great Jack Kirby's legendary attempt for Marvel in the early Seventies. Before that, another comics superstar, Gil Kane, made an attempt (scripted by Steve Englehart) that also went unpublished. (In news that might even be more exciting than the new comic, Titan will also be producing an oversized hardcover Artist Edition presenting the original art for both of these never-published adaptations! I'll post more news on that as I can get it.) In 1988, DC published the 4-volume, prestige format The Prisoner: Shattered Visage by Dean Motter and Mark Askwith, a then-contemporary sequel to the original series featuring an aged Number 6. The most recent Prisoner comic was published by Marvel in 2009, and tied in with the AMC miniseries, not the original show. While I'd love most to see new stories about McGoohan's Number 6, based on Titan's track record and Milligan's stellar past work, I'm very much looking forward to this modern take!