Just not feeling the Holiday Spirit, today

Six of one, half a dozen of the other...

I had the good fortune of catching an odd little gem while trawling the internet late last night. A few pages of the never produced Jack Kirby adaptation of the 1960's cult-classic tv show The Prisoner. Marvel Comics was going to do produce it back in the 70's but the project got canceled with only 17 pages of the first issue being completed.




( The Village and a few uninked pages )

Though a big fan of Kirby's work in general (especially his Kamandi and Mister Miracle series) I don't think his work is quite the right fit for the brooding, psychedellic paranoia of The Prisoner. I would've personally gone with Jim Steranko instead. I base this on Steranko's ground breaking work on Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D., whose pages exploded with Daliesque backdrops, photocollages and Pop Art page layouts. It's fun to think about what he could have done with Number 6's weekly mind control sessions and bouts of ontological warfare.

Oh well, in the end Marvel shit-canned the idea (though they did an 2001 comic with Kirby at the helm... which I believe was Moon Boy's first appearance if I'm not mistaken, shortly before he would be teamed up with Devil Dinosaur).

Still I would have loved to have seen Kirby drawing a Rover.


Jim Steranko - Strange Tales Cover