HE-MAN NEWSPAPER STRIP PART 7

"HE-MAN IN WONDERLAND" | "SHAKEN TO THE CORE" | "THE LAST SURVIVORS"
Story: Chris Weber | Art & Lettering: Gérald Forton
Colors by: Connie Schurr | Editor: Karen Wilson

We're back to the absurd with our next HE-MAN story arc, as Prince Adam and Cringer explore the royal library and come across the books Queen Marlene brought with her from Earth. Then while Adam browses through ALICE IN WONDERLAND, at Snake Mountain, Skeletor casts a long-distance spell on He-Man. The Sorceress appears and tells Adam to transform so that Skeletor's spell will be triggered and He-Man can overcome it. Adam agrees, and one "By the Power of Greyskull" later, our hero is sucked into Skeletor's version of Wonderland.

He-Man wanders around, meeting the Cheshire Cat, the Queen of Hearts and White Rabbit, the Mad Hatter, March Hare, and Doormouse, and so forth, eventually battling the Jabberwock as the queen's champion. The Cheshire Cat reveals himself as Skeletor in disguise, leading to the nightmarish sight of He-Man battling a giant feline with a skeleton face before triumphing again and returning to Eternia.

Honestly, this isn't as awful as the premise sounds. The beginning is a little iffy -- how does Skeletor know to create such an elaborately accurate Wonderland if he's presumably never read the book? But from there, it's actually kind of fun as He-Man wanders around on the same path as Alice. This seems like one I should dislike for it's weirdness, but unlike some past outings, Chris Weber executes that weirdness well, leading to an entertaining story.

"Shaken to the Core" picks up exactly where "He-Man in Wonderland" ended, as our hero returns to Eternia just in time to find the planet rocked by a massive earthquake. He-Man heads to the royal palace to do some damage control, then he accompanies Man-At-Arms and Miranda back to Rondale to perform disaster relief there, as well. Meanwhile, the Sorceress suffers a crisis of faith and, wondering whether she's still fit to act as the guardian of Castle Greyskull, heads out on a pilgrimage which also takes her to Rondale.

There, our heroes stumble into some kind of Silver Age superhero story, as a masked man calling himself the Faultmaster reveals that he's caused the quakes. Faultmaster taunts the people of Rondale and then vanishes. Eventually the Sorceress and He-Man both track him down, and He-Man defeats the villain after recognizing him as a disgraced scientist shunned by the Eternian Science Academy due to his theories on plate tectonics.

This... is a odd one. It starts off well enough, and for a while feels like another of those Skeletor-free Filmation episodes we've discussed previously. But when the masked villain shows up, everything gets weird. For one thing, Faultmaster claims to have magical powers, but when he vanishes in a cloud of smoke, the Sorceress realizes he's using smoke capsules rather than any sort of inherent magical power. But his ability to cause earthquakes is never explained! Presumably the "stage magic" angle was thrown in as the seed for an eventual reveal that he has some sort of machine to shake things up -- but such a moment never comes.

The artwork is getting sloppy at this point, too. Clearly some of the source material Dark Horse used to compile the book is not in the best of shape, but even taking that into account, Gérald Forton's faces are starting to look odd, like he's not putting much work into them. Plus, he continues to commit one of the cardinal offenses of sequential art, crossing word balloon tails because he's drawn characters on the wrong sides of the panel. (Which, again, seems ridiculous since he's both the artist and letterer of the strip!)

The newspaper strip's final storyline, "The Last Survivors", begins next. Originally published in 1991, it introduces elements from the 1990 NEW ADVENTURES OF HE-MAN toyline and cartoon series into its continuation of the Filmation universe. I must admit that I'm not terribly familiar with NEW ADVENTURES -- the toys and cartoon were so different from the line I grew up with that I basically just ignored it (though I do recall that at the least, I owned the He-Man and Skeletor figures). But I believe that continuity had He-Man leaving Eternia to live on another planet called Primus, aiding its people in fighting off an army of evil space mutants. Here, Primus is in the far-flung future, and a pair of its inhabitants return to modern-day Eternia to request He-Man's help against the mutants.

He-Man agrees and travels to the future with Flipshot and Hydron, though Skeletor hitches a ride in their time sphere. The sphere is damaged on arrival, and Hydron's elders quickly banish Skeletor to the planet's moon. There, Skeletor usurps leadership of the mutants from their master, Flogg, and leads the alien forces in an assault on Primus. He-Man coordinates the planet's defense and drives the bad guys off. The time sphere is repaired, and He-Man and Skeletor return to their own time -- but not before He-Man shares a romantic kiss with Mara, the future's most eligible bachelorette.

At this point, things wrap up extremely quickly with the strip cancelled. In one final Sunday page, He-Man and Skeletor arrive in the present, Skeletor escapes, He-Man returns to the royal palace, and declares that his time in the future has made him realize life is too short to "play games with loved ones" -- right in front of his parents, he changes back to Prince Adam, thus revealing his secret identity to them.

It's an okay ending, rushed though it is. I kind of like the idea that Adam has finally realized he can trust his own parents with his secret. This isn't some kind of Spider-Man thing, where Peter Parker needs to worry that if Aunt May knew his secret, her poor heart couldn't handle it. Adam's parents are still pretty young (despite colors in some prior Sunday pages mistakenly giving them white hair). They're also the king and queen of an entire planet; they keep secrets of state all the time, so knowing who He-Man really is should not be that big a deal for them. And for that matter, it's not as if knowing his secret will put them in any extra danger since, again, they're already very public figures. I get why Adam might have reasons to maintain a secret identity, but it seems odd he should need to keep it from his parents (or, for that matter, from Teela).

Overall, I liked the HE-MAN strip. There were some weird stories thrown in (see Evil-Lyn's perfume plot for one), and Chris Weber took some liberties with Eternian culture that rubbed me the wrong way (such as our characters watching their equivalent of television and dealing with paparazzi), but for the most part, the stories were entertaining, and Weber deepened Prince Adam as a character, while showing us a lot more of the day-to-day monarchy than we ever saw in the cartoon.

The artwork, however, was extremely hit-or-miss. Gérald Forton started off really, really strong, with great interpretations of the Filmation model sheets. But as the strip progressed, he began redesigning characters. Man-At-Arms' armor was replaced by a weird tunic, while He-Man became much slimmer than his usual muscular self, and his chest harness became comically oversized. Plus, just comparing the art from the earlier strips with those from the end, Forton looks to have come down with a bit of burnout. The artwork isn't as intricate and his style in general just looks sloppy in these final story arcs when they're examined right beside his initial work.

Still, this strip is a nice piece of MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE history, and even for its faults, it's an enjoyable read.