THE PRISONER
Rover’s Return
Number Six. Issue one. Still not the only spy in the Village.
released OUT NOW! Publisher Titan Comics
Writer Peter Milligan Artist Colin lorimer
The 1967 series The Prisoner is a tough act to follow – and many have tried.
2009’s US remake took the bold approach of reinventing one of the most iconoclastic series ever made as something fearsomely dull. Audio producers Big Finish have also had a crack at it, but their take (which mixes remakes of existing episodes with new stories) feels like a pastiche, with a less compelling Number Six. In comics, DC published a late-’80s miniseries, Shattered Visage, which was satisfyingly odd but somehow both enslaved to the original while also contradicting it. Now comes another comic, this time published by Titan. Peter Milligan and Colin Lorimer’s take on this most tricksy of series seems, two issues in, to have struck a fine balance between the old and new. Clearly set in the same continuity as the TV show, everything you’d expect from the series – Portmeirion, Rover, human chess – is present, correct and elegantly represented by Lorimer’s lines and Joana LaFluente’s brooding colour palette. At the same time, this is a new story with a new Number Six – and a few tricks up its sleeves.
An undercover agent for MI5, Breen, has discovered information about a MacGuffin known only as Pandora – and it’s not long before enemy agents come hunting for him. He tries to change his identity and escape, but he’s drugged, captured and wakes up in a very familiar village. So far, so Prisoner-by-numbers – at one point it almost feels like we’re watching a greatest hits reel of the show – but the series wrongfoots you when it becomes clear that Breen has deliberately let himself be captured as part of a larger scheme. Who, exactly, is playing who here is one of many questions we’re left with by the end of issue two.
Lorimer’s art has a grit and toughness to it that initially feels like a stark contrast to the show’s toytown-psych-meets-George Orwell aesthetic. As soon as we reach those familiar locations, however, it all clicks into place; this is a murkier Prisoner for a murkier time. At the same time, Milligan and Lorimer expand the world of the series in some subtle and intriguing ways. The hints that the Village is bigger and more powerful than any one nation makes it seem like a far more mysterious, powerful entity, while avoiding clunky exposition – this is The Prisoner, after all, and what we don’t know is often more important than what we do.
The comic can never hope to match the TV show’s impact or originality, but the first two issues of Milligan and Lortimer’s take succeeds in reprising its themes while respectfully updating it for the InfoWars age. Will Salmon
Back in 1969, Jack Kirby homaged The Prisoner in issues 84-87 of Fantastic Four, set in a Latverian village.
The world is expanded in subtle and intriguing ways