THE PRISONER
Published at last – Jack Kirby’s bonkers take on Patrick McGoohan’s bonkers TV show. It gets no bonkier.
NUMBER 6 NEARLY CAME TO COMICS IN THE ’70S. NICK SETCHFIELD WANTS INFORMATION…
IT’S ONE OF THE GREAT MIGHT - have-beens in comic book history: marvel’s version of The Prisoner, Patrick mcgoohan’s surrealistic spy-fi TV classic. “there was always this legendary rumour that there was this unpublished Prisoner,” says David Leach, editor of The Prisoner: Jack Kirby And Gil Kane Art Edition, which collects two very different takes on the show’s opening episode “arrival”, one written and drawn by Kirby, the other illustrated by Kane from a script by steve englehart.
“it was one of those mythical things,” says Leach. “the odd page would turn up on the internet and that was it. it took me 18 months of searching for the owners of the original artwork!”
SO HOW DID YOU FIND THE ART?
Getting hold of the Gil Kane artwork wasn’t a problem. We knew it was owned by one man. The owner had actually bought the whole thing in a job lot at auction. Then came the challenging part – okay, now track down the Jack Kirby! I was passed on to a very helpful man, Rand Hoppe, who runs the online Kirby Museum, and he acted as a go-between between me and the actual owner of the artwork, who had bought every page, also in an auction, which was astonishing. I don’t think we could have done the project otherwise. If the artwork had been split among many different collectors there’s no way we could have got it all together. When I got the pages in all the hairs on my arms stood up. I almost burst into tears. I know they were only scans but they were 100 Meg scans so this was as close as I’ll ever get to holding the original artwork. It was a religious experience! [laughs]
HOW DID JACK KIRBY GET INVOLVED WITH THE PRISONER?
Originally Gil Kane was hired to do the Steve Englehart version, based on the opening episode of The Prisoner. This was the time Kirby was coming back to Marvel from DC. They offered him quite a good deal to come back. It turned out he was also a huge Prisoner fan, so he had a go at it. He also adapted “Arrival”, writing and drawing it himself. For some unknown reason Marvel decided not to
go any further with it. It sat around in drawers and finally ended up on the market.
WHY DO YOU THINK THE SHOW APPEALED TO HIM?
You look at pictures of Kirby and he looks like a regular guy. But you look at his artwork and it’s never normal, it’s never regular – it’s always psychedelic, it’s always out there. Massive, galaxy-spanning ideas. The thing that probably appealed to him is the idea of one man fighting against the system, fighting to be an individual, not to be put in a box. And also the location: Portmeirion is such an important character. You had this incredibly weird story, set in the weirdest place on the planet. Kirby goes out of his way to capture the essence of Portmeirion.
WHERE DO YOU THINK KIRBY MIGHT HAVE TAKEN THE PRISONER IF HE’D HAD THE CHANCE TO GO BEYOND ADAPTING THE ORIGINAL EPISODES?
I really don’t know! The thing about The
Prisoner is that you can do so much with it – it’s such an extraordinarily interesting world. Only 17 episodes and yet there’s so much in there that you can mine. I like to think he would have run with it and produced something amazing.
The Prisoner: Jack Kirby And Gil Kane Art Edition is out 10 July from Titan Comics.