HE-MAN NEWSPAPER STRIP PART 6

"A WORLD IN THE BALANCE" | "AT THE EDGE OF THE DARKEST NIGHT"
Story: Chris Weber | Art & Lettering: Gérald Forton
Colors by: Connie Schurr | Editor: Karen Wilson

Things have calmed down on Eternia since the defeat of Iandir the Ice Queen, which prompts Prince Adam to decide a vacation is in order. The past several strips have played with the idea that Adam is beginning to resent He-Man; that he would like to go adventuring as himself now and then -- but he feels he can't show himself physically competent in any way, lest he blow his secret identity as a foppish layabout. So Adam asks Randor for leave to depart the palace for a few weeks. A bit of soap opera ensues, during which Randor chastises his son for shirking his duties -- but recent strips have also taken pains to depict Adam maturing into a capable member of Randor's ruling council, and when the king realizes this, he agrees that Adam has earned some time off.

Gwildor gets wind of Adam's plans and invites himself along, suggesting a trip to a neighboring planet called Naxos. Before leaving, Adam transforms Cringer into Battle Cat, then recruits Clamp Champ and Ram-Man to help safeguard Eternia in his absence. The Sunday page coloring issues which I mentioned last week continue here, though I'm not absolutely certain all the errors can be laid at the feet of Connie Schurr this time. Clearly there are some Sundays which were printed with missing color plates; there's too much drab brown for these to have been intentionally colored as they are. But even on the strips which appear to be faithfully reproduced, Schurr's colors leave much to be desired. Randor has his brown hair back, but his clothes change color, seemingly randomly, from Sunday to Sunday -- as do Adam's. It's as if Schurr simply gave up entirely on the Filmation palette, and on any sort of consistency in general, and started throwing random colors at the strips for the heck of it. But on the plus side, we've reached a point in the run where the editors behind this volume were unable to find colored versions of all the Sundays, so a few in this arc are reprinted in black-and-white -- and as the strip continues toward its conclusion, colorless Sundays will eventually become the norm.

Adam and Gwildor, with Orko along as well, take a spaceship to Naxos. (Departing from the Eternian palace's spaceport, which seems a little weird since the planet just conducted its very first interstellar mission only a few storylines back -- but they've already built a dedicated spaceport for what seems to be their one and only craft capable of such flights? ) Upon landing, our heroes go swimming, meet some local wildlife, and realize that Naxos's very existence is threatened by solar flares. Adam changes to He-Man for a brief period, but since Gwildor is unaware of his dual identity, he eventually helps to save the day, via an extravehicular walk in space, as himself.

It's a lackluster story, but it gains some points for being the first arc since the strip began to not use Skeletor or Hordak in any way. As I've noted before, the Filmation cartoon had a fair number of episodes where Skeletor wasn't the main villain, and it's nice to see the strip follow suit; even if the material itself is boring, I always give points for effort. That said, I do take issue with one aspect of Chris Weber's script: at one point, as he mulls over the fact that Man-At-Arms has become engaged to Miranda, Adam says that Duncan has always been like an "older brother" to him? Huh?? Man-At-Arms was clearly a contemporary of King Randor in the TV series. For Pete's sake, he was a full-grown adult when Adam was a baby, as seen in the SHE-RA pilot mini-series, "The Secret of the Sword"! If anything, he's a "kindly uncle figure" to Adam. Calling him a brother just feels wrong.

Though the most offensive part of this tale isn't the script -- it's Gérald Forton's artwork. There's a scene, shortly after landing on Axos, where Adam and Orko go snorkeling. Adam strips down to his shorts for the swim. When he come back out of the water, Forton dresses him in He-Man's chest harness. Adam then spends several strips running around in the harness, interacting with Gwildor (who, again, doesn't know his secret), and eventually uses the Power Sword to change -- transforming from Adam in He-Man's harness to He-Man himself (i.e., not "changing" at all, visually). Clearly, Forton lost track of who he was supposed to be drawing during the sequence with shirtless Adam, but it's kind of unforgivable that the blunder lasted for a couple weeks' worth of published strips. He or editor Karen Wilson should have caught this and corrected it immediately within a day or two.

Speaking of Forton, I should also note that this arc features multiple instances of something that's plagued him since the strip started -- he often draws characters standing on opposite sides of a panel from where their dialogue should appear. For example, Adam on the left side of a panel and Orko on the right, when Orko is the first speaker and should thus be on the left -- when the characters are flipped, the balloons have pointers "crossing" to opposite sides of the panel. This leads to some really amateur-looking strips. I know sequential art isn't Forton's forté (pun intended), being a Filmation concept artist first and foremost -- but we're years into the strip at this point. You'd think he would've figured out how sloppy it looks by this point (or, again, that editor Wilson would've said something).

"At the Edge of the Darkest Night" returns Adam and company to Eternia, where our prince and Clamp Champ accompany Teela for a royal inspection of a distant outpost. Once more, Weber returns to his concept of tabloid media on Eternia, as Adam and friends are followed in their task by a retinue of reporters. And, look -- I'd have less of an issue with something like this if there was precedent for it. But in the HE-MAN TV show, there was never any sort of TV news depicted. Adam, Randor, and others frequently went out for diplomatic purposes totally unaccompanied by anyone other than Man-At-Arms and/or Teela. The idea that they're now being followed around by reporters is, in the universe as it already existed, bizarre.

Weber also revisits a character named Dian from the awful "When You Need Something Extra" arc. In that storyline, she was a young palace guard who somehow led the media to believe that He-Man had fallen on hard times and was looking for handouts. It was an absurd sub-plot in an already offensively awful story. Here, Dian is now overseeing the outpost Adam and friends have come to inspect. She spends much of the story making fun of, and insulting, Prince Adam to his face, until Adam eventually proves himself to her with his bomb-defusing skills and powers of negotiation.

The storyline itself features Skeletor, accompanied by henchman Whiplash, trying to locate the tomb of an ancient Eternian warlord. He raises an army of stone warriors to do his bidding, and our heroes follow him underground. There, Adam learns that the Power of Greyskull is hereditary, having been passed through Eternia's royal family for generations. It's a cool idea, and one that, per an interview in the Dark Horse collection, Weber had hoped to explore further until Mattel put the kibosh on it. However in recent years that attitude seems to have changed, as the 2002 MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE reboot series presented Adam's ancestor, King Greyskull, as the original wielder of the power, while the more recent MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE CLASSICS action figures have indeed presented "He-Man" as a title passed down over the decades.

In the end, I suppose "At the Edge of the Darkest Night" leaves me with mixed feelings. For the most part, it feels very much like a decent Filmation episode, which is of course what I look for in any of these storylines -- since they are, after all, continuing Filmation's continuity. But the presence of the reporters just pulls me out of the idea that this could take place in that universe -- and that feeling is made just a bit worse by the fact that they add nothing to the story. They play no role outside of just following Adam around, in the background most of the time -- which means they could've been excised completely from the proceedings and left us with one of the most Filmation-y stories this strip has seen!