He-Man & The Masters of the Multiverse #5: Back In Time

I say it about every thirty days or so, but THIS was totally my favorite issue of He-Man and the Masters of the Multiverse!!!!  That’s five times in a row that I’ve started a review that way. Well, I wouldn’t be doing it if it weren’t true. Each issue of this title gets better and better. This time, author Tim Seeley takes “the team” to a universe that might not be too familiar to a lot of people, but if you’re a He-MANIAC like me, it’s a warm welcome to a where it all started. We return to the original He-Man universe, the universe of the very first mini-comics that came with the initial figures. In that universe, He-Man was just a really strong, barbarian guy who left his village on Eternia and went to find a way to stop Skelator, a demon that was trying to get back to his own dimension, only to return with his people and conquer Eternia. For this issue, everything about the book changes. I’m not talking about story-wise. The layout, format, look, feel, if the previous four issues were the North Pole, this issue would be the South Pole…….of Pluto.

And don’t even think I can talk about art in this book, if I typed everything that I wanted to, Comic Watch would crack in half and the rest of the fam would be mad at me. Suffice it to say, artist Tom Derenick pulls it off, yet again, in totally changing his style. I can’t imagine how you go from a style that was that of a cartoon from the 1980s to an almost painted style. THEN, he uses the painted-style art for sequential storytelling and it turns out to be fantastic!!! Again, I can’t say enough great things about Derenick’s art.