American comic book Kane and Bill Finger created Batman, who debuted in "Detective Comics" #27 (1939). The period from the late 1930s through roughly the end of the 1940s is referred to by comic book experts as the Golden Age of comic books. It featured extremely large print-runs, with "Action Comics" and "Captain Marvel" selling over half a million copies a month each; comics provided very popular cheap entertainment during World War II especially among soldiers, but with erratic quality in stories, art, and printing. In the early 1940s over 90 percent of girls and boys from seven to seventeen read comic books.
The Prisoner in other media series fascinated comic book artist Jack Kirby, who created a four-issue homage in 1969 in "Fantastic Four" #84-87, in which the superhero team finds itself in Doctor Doom's Latveria, a city like the Village in many respects. In the "Bullpen Bulletins" page in Marvel Comics cover-dated July 1976, Marvel announced a comic book based on "The Prisoner", to be written by Steve Englehart and drawn by a then-unchosen artist and scheduled to be "starting this summer". The artist assigned to the project would be Gil Kane. When Jack Kirby returned to Marvel in the mid-70s after a run at DC