Posted in: Comics | Tagged: gil kane, jack kirby, Steve Englehart, The prisoner, titan

Titan to Release Unpublished The Prisoner Comics by Jack Kirby, Gil Kane, and Steve Englehart

Published Mon, 22 Jan 2018 15:27:04 -0600

Titan Comics has a book coming out featuring a few up and coming young comic book creators you may want to keep an eye on. Coinciding with the launch of Peter Milligan and Colin Lorimer's new The Prisoner comic this year, Titan plans to publish The Prisoner: Original Art Edition, a hardcover collection which features never-before-published work by Jack Kirby, Gil Kane, and Steve Englehart, part of an attempt to launch a Prisoner comic at Marvel in the 1970s. The book will feature a full issue of Kirby art, some of it inked by Mike Royer, 18 pages of Kane pencils, and a script for Kane's issue from Englehart.

Wikipedia explains the history of the unpublished pages:

The premise of the television series fascinated comic book artist Jack Kirby, who created a four-issue homage in 1969 in Fantastic Four #84-87, in which the superhero team finds itself in Doctor Doom's Latveria, a city like the Village in many respects. In the "Bullpen Bulletins" page in Marvel Comics cover-dated July 1976, Marvel announced a comic book based on The Prisoner, to be written by Steve Englehart and drawn by a then-unchosen artist and scheduled to be "starting this summer". The artist assigned to the project would be Gil Kane. When Jack Kirby returned to Marvel in the mid-70s after a run at DC Comics, the property was transferred to him. A test issue was put together but never completed (all 17 pages were scripted and pencilled by Kirby, but only parts were lettered and inked, by Mike Royer). Original artwork from this comic still exists and occasionally turns up for auction. Some of it has been published in the comic book fanzine The Jack Kirby Collector. The surviving artwork suggests that the first issue, at least, would have been an adaptation of "Arrival."

The new hardcover, as well as the new series, coincides with the 50th anniversary of the show's U.S. debut, though it aired a year earlier in Canada and the U.K. The Prisoner was co-created by and starred Patrick McGoohan as the titular prisoner, a former British agent held captive in a mysterious village as agents attempt to extract information from him. A four issue sequel comic called Shattered Visage by Dean Motter and Mark Askwith was released by DC Comics in 1988. The Hollywood Reporter had the scoop on this news today.