Obscure Comic of the Month is a monthly
feature which takes a detailed look at a little known entry from my
personal comic book collection. Some will be from major publishers,
others self published projects, Original Graphic Novels, issues and
Manga. What they'll all have in common though, is that I've rarely,
if ever, seen anybody talk about them.
The Prisoner: Shattered Visage by Dean
Motter and Mark Askwith – DC Comics 1988
Contains Major Spoilers
Spies and secret agents were the
courageous champions of the 1960's. The glamour, the gadgets, and the
beautiful femme fatales were inseparable from the weighty
implications of their daring assignments. It was a time when
espionage seemed exotic and even heroic.
In 1968 one television show
challenged that notion. Indeed, it even questioned the nature of an
individual's relationship to society. That show was THE PRISONER.
It was the story of a man who, after
resigning from a top secret government agency, finds himself the
prisoner of an unknown power in an ominous wonderland known as The
Village.
Now, twenty years later, in an era
where the morality of covert operations is no longer taken for
granted, we again find ourselves in The Village. It's fate and
significance are, at last, about to be revealed.
Shattered Visage is far from what can
be considered truly obscure, but for a licensed comic, and indeed The
Prisoner's only licensed comic, it goes almost unmentioned by many. I
once asked Chris Sims from Comics Alliance about his thoughts on the
book, and he confessed he couldn't really remember much about it. So,
since nobody else felt up to the task, here is The Prisoner:
Shattered Visage.
One can never understate the importance
of The Prisoner. It was the first TV series, truly the first, that
insisted the viewer engage the story as a whole. Though each episode
was mostly self contained, it demanded that viewers tune in every
week to pick the story apart for clues. You can almost see the
through line with it's legacy today. Without The Prisoner there would
have been no Twin Peaks, no X-Files, no The Wire, Breaking Bad or
Game of Thrones.
Shattered Visage is a strange book,
even by it's source material's standards. It seeks to be many things.
A continuation of a long finished TV series. Both a re-visitation and
deconstruction of it's themes. An explanation of it's final
mysteries. That Shattered Visage would set it's goal so high, is
almost certainly undermined by the fact that it is not nearly as
clever as it thinks it is.
The story is packed with call backs and
references. Conversations and lines of dialogue are taken almost
verbatim from the original series and uttered in a new context. The
art repeatedly uses visual cues to reinforce it's 'prisoner' theme,
using panel frames as prison bars being one such example.
By and large a lot of this stuff hits
its mark. I first read Shattered Visage about three months after
finishing the TV series, and I lapped up all of the fanservice. It's
only looking back now that I realise that the book is all style and
no substance. It's actual narrative has very little to add or say
about the series on which it is based.
Our story is split mostly into two
parts. Alice, a former secret agent, has her round-the-world boat
trip sabotaged and ends up stranded in The Village, crossing paths
with a now deranged Number Six. Her ambitious husband, Thomas, also a
secret agent and the one responsible for the sabotage, scrabbles
around the halls of power trying to unravel The Village's mystery.
Practically nothing happens for most of
The Village segments beyond nods to the series, and instilling a
cathartic tone at seeing the previously sinister landscape brought
low. The Whitehall segments have significantly more meat, but don't
give us anywhere near enough answers to feel fulfilling. Nor do the
Whitehall segments feel like The Prisoner at all.
In many respects Shattered Visage feels
as though it was written too early. That the writers didn't have
enough hindsight to truly deconstruct The Prisoner. It's worth
mentioning that overturning nostalgia was still a new trick back in
1988 (Watchmen was published only a year earlier.)
It's main theme, the idea that The
Village was merely a prototype for Western Civilisation is a great
pay off. Though it would be a lot more cutting now in a world of mass
surveillance, media outreach and cult of celebrity. The warnings of
The Prisoner now are a hell of a lot more harrowing than they were in
1988.
The story finally starts kicking into
gear towards the climax, with Number Six and Number Two finally
having a showdown and the British Government moving to take The
Village and it's secrets. But it's all over far to quickly, with
little to give us a satisfying conclusion and it's pessimistic
predictions given little foundation to build upon.
It's frustrating in a way. A lot of the
written dialogue has the wit and sharpness of the TV show at it's
best, yet we're never really given the great stakes for it to rise
to. Motter's art too is great, but some weird design choices, like
giving Number 6 a massive beard and rendering him almost
unrecognisable, rob the book of that classic Prisoner identity.
When it comes down to it, Shattered
Visage is fan fiction. It may be classed as an authorised sequel and
headed by a major publisher, but under all of that it's still fanfic.
Motter and Askwith themselves know as much of Patrick McGoohan's
secrets as you or I do. What conclusions the book gives us are little
more than their own theories.
McGoohan, for what it's worth, said
something along the lines of “Reasonable enough, I suppose.”
Ultimately, if Shattered Visage had
committed fully to at least one of it's goals then maybe it would
have been a success. Sadly, it's not nearly trippy and psychedelic
enough the feel like a continuation of the series, nor does it
provide any satisfying answers to the mysteries that the series left.
It wants to make it's mark on The Prisoner canon, but spends most if
it's time reiterating things from the series. At one point a
character utters “There's something of Number 6 in all of us,” as
though it is deep and meaningful. It isn't.
There's a lot of good in Shattered
Visage. The numerous references, both texual and visual, will please
any fan of the series. But it's undercooked. Shattered Visage hasn't
the time to make any grand statements on the human condition, and was
written at a time that lacked the perspective to give them.
For most comics, that might still be
enough, but when you propose to be a sequel to one of the most
important pieces of art the 20th Century has given us, you
are held to a higher standard.
Be seeing you.
Jack Harvey 2015. The Prisoner:
Shattered Visage (c) 1988 DC Comics, Dean Motter and Mark Askwith.
The Prisoner was created by Patrick McGoohan and George Markstein and
produced by ITC Entertainment. Images used under Fair Use.
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