HE-MAN/THUNDERCATS #1 - 6

"SWORDS AND OMENS" | "WHEN THUNDER STRIKES" | "SWORDS AND SORROWS"
"CLASH OF TITANS!" | "THE FALL OF GRAYSKULL!" | "ACROSS THE UNIVERSE"

Written by Rob David & Lloyd Goldfine | Drawn by Freddie E. Williams II
Colored by Jeremy Colwell | Lettered by Deron Bennett
Associate Editor: Jessica Chen | Editor: Kristy Quinn | Group Editor: Jim Chadwick

So it's time for a confession. A little more than twenty years ago, I wrote a full-fledged fan-fiction story about a team-up between He-Man and the ThunderCats. It's probably still floating around out there someplace, since nothing ever goes away on the internet. It was a labor of love for me, and while I haven't looked at it in a very long time, I still remember a lot about it. So a crossover between these two is sometihng that's interested me for a long time. (I would've played it myself as a kid, if the toylines had been in scale with one another.)

So it's with heavy heart that I must report this particular meeting between the ThunderCats and the Masters of the Universe, in a 2016 DC miniseries, is... not good. It has its moments, which we'll look at below, but overall it's a pretty big letdown -- and I don't think that's because I had any unrealistic expectations for it; rather I believe it's because I had fairly reasonable expectations!

We'll begin with the artwork. At face value, it's fine. A little busy for my own personal taste, but very energetic and exciting. The problem -- and this is personal taste, I know -- is that I don't believe it's right for this kind of story. A mini-series meant to capitalize on nostalgia for two properties from the eighties should be drawn in a style that resembles those properties as they existed at that time. I know DC has had the MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE license for years now, and they're doing their own modern spin on the property -- so there, modern artwork and artistic license are totally appropriate and acceptable. But here, I can't help feeling the story would have felt more authentic if the art had taken its cues from the HE-MAN and THUNDERCATS cartoon series (or the minicomics or something else of that era).

SPRINGTIME GRAB BAG

It's time once more for that annual tradition where I dig through the various and sundry comics I've bought but have yet to read, and review some of them. This year, I've got offerings in the queue from DC, Dark Horse (sort of), and Dynamite.

We'll start on Monday with the first DC offering, a crossover I would've gone nuts for as a child: HE-MAN/THUNDERCATS. I bought this one a few years ago via Comixology, I think around the same time I also picked up BATMAN/TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES ADVNTURES, but I just never got around to it until now.

We'll follow that up with another crossover, also half from DC: WONDER WOMAN/CONAN. The Conan half of the story comes from Dark Horse, back when they still had the license. And then we'll keep the Conan theme running with a book I grabbed in a Comixology sale when Dark Horse lost that license: CONAN: THE DAUGHTERS OF MIDORA & OTHER STORIES. But our Hyborian Age antics won't end there! The following week, we'll read our first of two books from Dynamite: RED SONJA: THE BALLAD OF THE RED GODDESS, written by Sonja's co-creator, Roy Thomas.

After that, it's one final Dynamite offering: FLASH GORDON: KING'S CROSS, a limited series which sort of revisited the concept of the 1980s DEFENDERS OF THE EARTH cartoon series, in that it teams up King Features' best-known comic strip action stars -- Flash, the Phantom, and Mandrake the Magician. And then we'll hop over to IDW for a look at last year's STAR TREK/TRANSFORMERS series.

All of this will take us through April, and when it's done I'll reveal what's coming up next: something from the House of Ideas, a place we haven't visited in over a year, if you can believe it!