Captain's Library: TV GUIDE "X-Files: Circle Game"

With the revival mini-series ending tonight...

...we thought we'd re-present probably the only never-reprinted story from the fabled Topps Comics run (1995-98).

Written by Stefan Petrucha and illustrated by Charles (The Walking Dead) Adlard, this tale appeared in the July 15, 1995 issue of TV Guide.
For the British-born Adlard, his work on The X-Files comic was his American breakout assignment, after doing projects for Marvel UK, the short-lived Defiant Comics, and beginning work on Topps' Mars Attacks revival.
His somewhat-abstract style, capturing the essence of the characters instead of exact likenesses, worked perfectly in keeping the moodiness and atmosphere of the TV show, where darkness and shadow played such an important part of the imagery.

Captain's Library: THE PRISONER Conclusion

When Last We Left The Prisoner...

The Prisoner awakens to find himself in...The Village.
He plies a waitress at an outdoor cafe with questions (closely paraphrased from the tv show's pilot episode), but learns nothing.
A flashback (Jack Kirby's version of the tv series' main title sequence, cleverly interpolated) reveals how the Prisoner resigned from his position, summarily kidnapped, and transported to The Village.
He leaves the cafe and takes a taxi ride, which, again, reveals almost nothing.
Back in his appointed cottage, he receives and accepts a telephoned invitation from Number Two to meet him at "the Georgian House" (aka "the Green Dome").

As you may have noticed, some pages are completed, some are lettered and partially-inked, some are lettered, some are partially-lettered, and some are only penciled.

As to what happened, TwoMorrows, publisher of the amazing magazine Jack Kirby Collector, did a feature piece on the project in #11, which was reprinted in the trade paperback Jack Kirby Collector Volume 2 and posted HERE.

Presumably, the second issue would have adapted the remainder of the pilot episode, "Arrival".

After that, Kirby might have gone off on his own, the way he did with his adaptation of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

In the mid-1990s, Topps Comics, who had done a series of books called the Kirbyverse, using previously-unpublished Kirby material along with new stories by other writers and artists, planned to publish a Prisoner trade paperback combining this story with the other unpublished Marvel Prisoner adaptation by Steve Englehart and Gil Kane.

But the comic division's demise prevented it from happening. (The rest of Topps is still chugging along 15 years later.)

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