Titan Comics have announced that next year, it will be publishing “The Prisoner,” a sequel to the classic British science-fiction television series of the same name by writer Peter Milligan (“Hellblazer”) and artist Colin Lorimer (“The Hunt,” “Harvest”). First broadcast in 1967, The Prisoner was co-created by and starred Patrick McGoohan as “Number Six,” a former spy who found himself imprisoned on a mysterious coastal resort called the Village, where administrators known only as “Number Two” tried to break him.
A surreal landmark in television history, The Prisoner has been parodied and homaged countless times, including in The Simpsons episode “The Computer Wore Menace Shoes,” where McGoohan reprised his role. The show was remade in 2009 with Jim Caviezel and Ian McKellen, and film versions have been mooted by Christopher Nolan and Ridley Scott.
During the late 1970s, Marv Wolfman, Steve Englehart and Gil Kane teamed up at Marvel to produce a comic book of “The Prisoner,” only for Stan Lee to decide Jack Kirby should oversee the project. That series was also scrapped, but Kirby drew one issue which can be read here. DC eventually produced a four-issue sequel in 1988 by Dean Motter (“Terminal City”) and Mark Askwith (“Batman: Gotham Knights”), collected in paperback as “The Prisoner: Shattered Visage.”
Milligan told The Hollywood Reporter that it was an honor to write the new comic. After going into the history of his own fandom and how he would speculate about what the show was really about, he simply said the comic will follow “Number 6’s successor.”
“The Prisoner” will be released in 2018 to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the show’s US broadcast.