Sci-Fi Bulletin: Exploring the Universes of SF, Fantasy, Horror and Spy-fi!

The Prisoner is returning to comic books, courtesy of Titan.

To celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the first UK broadcast of celebrated cult favourite The Prisoner, Titan Comics – licensed by ITV Studios Global Entertainment – have announced an all-new comic books based on the original TV show written by Peter Milligan (The Mummy, Dan Dare, Hellblazer) with art by Colin Lorimer (The X-Files, Hellraiser, Harvest) coming in 2018!

The Prisoner first aired on ITV in the United Kingdom on 29 September 1967 – and in 1968 in the US – and was a hit with global audiences due to its surreal mix of spy fiction with sci-fi, allegory and psychological drama elements.

The worldwide smash hit series starred Patrick McGoohan (Danger Man, Ice Station Zebra) as Number 6 – the fiery British former secret agent who is abducted and held prisoner in a shadowy coastal village, where his captors try to find out why he abruptly resigned from his job.

 “For a story where all is ambiguous, 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,” said Peter Milligan writer of the new re-imagined comic books. “So what an honour it is now, thanks to Titan Comics, to be writing Number 6’s successor into that enigmatic and beguiling world. And how cool it is to imagine that while I’m writing this new iteration of the Prisoner, I am at least for a while… number one.”

DC Comics produced Shattered Visage, a four part Prisoner story in 1988 while Jack Kirby prepared a version in the 1970s for Marvel.