Back in the late 1980s Dean Motter and Mark Askwith created a comic book sequel to the cult classic TV show The Prisoner, which was published by DC Comics. In San Diego this week, Titan Comics announced that they will republish the long out-of-print story, The Prisoner: Shattered Visage, with Motter’s character sketches and notes.
“When I was approached to do a series based on The Prisoner, I leapt at the chance. It was one of my favorite TV shows when it first aired. My thinking turned to doing it as a post-modernist fable – one that took place in the current era, but that would re-open the questions from the original saga,” Motter said in a press release. “However, doing the research was going to take more resources than I had – so I drafted my friend and colleague Mark Askwith to help me with that aspect of the project. It became a collaboration almost instantly. I am honored to see it re-presented as part of Titan’s ongoing celebration of The Prisoner‘s ongoing 50th anniversary.”
The Prisoner first aired on TV in the UK in 1967 and in 1968 in the U.S. The cult classic was a surreal mix of spy fiction with sci-fi, allegory and psychological drama elements, and starred Patrick MacGoohan as Number 6 — a British secret agent who was held captive by unknown abductees in a coastal town called The Village as they tried to extract information from him.
Titan currently holds the license for comics based on The Prisoner, and have published a new miniseries by Peter Milligan and Colin Lorimer. They also obtained the rights to an unpublished Prisoner comic by Jack Kirby, Gil Kane and Steve Englehart, which is scheduled to be published next week.
Originally published in 1988, Shattered Visage tells the story of former secret agent Alice Drake, whose round-the-world solo voyage is interrupted when she is accidentally shipwrecked and washes up on the shores of The Village. There she encounters Number Six, finds out what has become of Number Two, and discovers the true purpose of The Village.
No word on when exactly it will be published.