He-Man & the Masters of the Multiverse #4: Paydirt!

Sometimes anticipation is better than the actual payoff. Remember when the movie Snakes on a Plane was coming out? Every time they showed the trailer, people were standing up and cheering. Everybody, I mean everybody was talking about it, all of the time. Heck, people were quoting lines from the movie before the movie even came out. When the movie did coming out like 13 people went to see it. Pretty much everybody’s response when asked if they saw it was “wait, you were serious about that?”.

This issue is the opposite of that. For four long months, we’ve been waiting for He-Man, He-Man, and Keldor to visit the one Masters of the Universe…universe that we all know and love. Yeah boy, you know I’m talking about the Filmation He-Man and the Masters of the Universe….universe. The cartoon, if you will. Author Tim Seeley gives us the best issue yet of this series as we get what all of us He-Fans have been waiting forever for, a comic based on the cartoon!! Yes, there was the Star series in the ’80s, but this is set firmly in the cartoon universe, whereas that one was set close to that universe, but not really in it. Storywise, this could’ve easily been the Brady Bunch movie (main characters stuck in a time far removed from reality), but Seeley is the man to take this ball and run with it. He gives the audience logical reasons why what happens in this issue happens, things happen that really couldn’t happen anywhere else, and it’s a great, entertaining, exciting story. Seeley throws in a bunch of people that we’d hoped to see, and it makes the issue even more satisfying. Then just when I thought “There’s really no other MOTU cannon that I can think of”. Seeley whips out a gigantic surprise that actually made my jaw drop. Now. I’m counting the days until the next issue. You’re gonna have to see this to believe it.

Artist Tom Derenick gets my vote for artist of the year. This issue he’s able to draw the cartoon-style characters and landscape 100% accurately, as well as have some of those characters interact with other characters from different places and they all gel together fantastically. There are a couple of full-page panels this issue that will have you taken aback with this detail, atmosphere and quite frankly, they might scare the hell out of you. This is an amazing looking book, I’ve already looked through it 3 times already just looking for something I might have missed. This art is beautiful.