Having downloaded the PDF for The Prisoner comic, an eight-page comic made available at the San Diego Comic-Con that sets up the events of AMC's six-hour miniseries in November 2009 (starring Sir Ian McKellen and Jim Caviezel), I feel decidedly underwhelmed.
I will say that I recognize the comic as a piece of promotional material. A teaser meant to whet the appetite, which in itself is no better and, let's hope, no worse than that "Last Supper" business NBC Universal and the people behind Battlestar Galactica shoved down our throats.
Without spoiling it for you, the comic denotes a completely different direction from its original source material, which... might be a severe mistake. The penultimate fait accompli of this remake, if you will.
The point of the series is this: an extremely valuable unnamed intelligence agent with a promising career suddenly, and without warning or any apparent rationale, resigns. After resigning, he is abducted and finds himself in a place called "The Village," where he is subjected to various attempts to extract the reason for his sudden resignation, which he doesn't care to disclose. There is also the question of which side "The Village" operates for and, while very much a prison of sorts, it is impossible to tell who are the prisoners and who are the wardens.
Everyone in The Village has a number. The unnamed prisoner, the protagonist of the story, is called Number 6. (To answer your question: Yes, this was the origin for the name of that blonde number with the glowing spine from that television show with the ship that looked like a cross between a ribbed prophylactic and an alligator on skis.) More often than not, the antagonist is a person referred to as Number Two, who apparently runs The Village. In the original 1967 series, the Number Two would often be a different person, mostly a man, and sometimes a woman.
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