Introducing He-Man!

The story behind the story of my helping create the story behind the story of He-Man and the Masters of the Universe (originally published in DC Through the 80s: The End of Eras, DC Comics, 2020):

We were probably too old to be sitting on the conference room floor playing with action figures. It was all strictly professional, of course.

         Honest.

         Anyway, DC Comics editor Dave Manak and I weren’t actually playing with action figures so much as we were familiarizing ourselves with a new product line that we had been assigned to turn into a comic book story—five comic book stories, when all was said and done, including two appearances with Superman.

         The toy company was Mattel, makers of Barbie dolls and Hot Wheels cars (which had been a short-lived licensed DC Comics series in 1970), and the new product line was Masters of the Universe.

         Mattel had a lot invested in MOTU. Launching a new toy line was an expensive proposition, costing as much as a million dollars in development, tooling, and inventory before a single toy left the warehouse. And ever since the success of Kenner’s Six Million Dollar Man action figures changed the toy business from company-created originals to licensed properties, they could also face up to another half a million dollars in licensing fees.

         According to Mark Ellis, then Mattel’s Director of Marketing for Male Action Toys, Games, and Novelties in an interview with He-Man.org in 2013, “Mattel was having little success with its licensed products, like MegaForce [based on a 1982 Hal Needham action film that bombed at the box office and made more than one list of the year’s worst movies] or Clash of the Titans [a 1981 heroic fantasy film featuring visual effects by Ray Harryhausen]. The solution [they] came up with was to develop our own characters and not be dependent on a license or its timing.”

        Ellis said, “To be clear, the task was not to develop He-Man and the Masters of the Universe. The idea was to develop a male action figure line.” The exact form of that line would eventually be determined by research into “how the line would be played with, the composition of the line, and what elements made characters more popular with boys…research was done to explore how and why children played with male action figures.

         “What became clear was that for a five-year-old, power was a central issue because seemingly they were always being bossed around. Psychologically, they wanted to be the boss. They wanted the power. This was manifested in the figure by making him ‘the strongest man in the universe.’ The idea is…you are in charge of the most powerful man in the universe…As the line developed, the phrase ‘I have the power’ was born to emphasize that point.”

         By the time the Masters of the Universe figures arrived at DC for Dave and me to familiarize ourselves with them, all the research, development, design, innovation (like the “Battle Action Waist,” whose mechanism dictated the figures’ 5 1/4" height), and packaging had been done. The only thing He-Man and the MOTU didn’t have was much of a history, or what we writer-types call a back story.

         And, if not for Mark Ellis’s snappy answer to a serious question from a buyer for the Child World toy store chain, DC might never have had the opportunity to provide one. Ellis recalled, “In the fall of 1982…at the end of the first presentation, they asked me, ‘What marketing program do you have in conjunction with another company that is not just TV advertising?’” I answered their question with a question, ‘Did I tell you about the He-Man comic we are doing?’…but it left me with making good…I flew to New York to persuade [DC or Marvel Comics] to do a Masters of the Universe comic. When I showed DC the figures, they were excited about [it] and said yes…While it was a thought bred from necessity, it was a good marketing idea, which we eventually included with all of the figures in the form of a mini comic inside the package.”

He-Man and the Masters of the Universe made their mainstream comic book debut co-starring with Superman in the Man of Steel’s monthly team-up title, DC Comics Presents #47 (July 1982). In a note in that issue’s letter’s page, I wrote (in the third person), “Taking the idea of a line of action figures and turning them into a viable comic book required some work. Masters of the Universe project editor Dave Manak and writer Paul Kupperberg had to have several conferences with Mattel representative Mark Ellis to hammer out the characters and, effectively, create a whole new world on which to place them. There was some amount of fun to this, especially the opportunity to spend an entire morning playing with a million and a half dollars’ worth of prototype action figures, accessories, and playsets.”

         Ellis recalled his role in crafting the backstory as largely advisory, saying, “We told DC about the research for the product line, the powers of each character, and the importance of power as a theme. The fact of the matter was that we were toy people, not comic people. All of the credit for the storylines in the comic goes to them.”

         But Dave and I were “comic people,” and we saw immediately that what Mattel had bought with that extensive and expensive research was the basic formula for a comic book series. He-Man’s personification of the power craved by their five-year-old research subjects was the same power fantasy superheroes have represented to readers since Superman defined the genre in 1938. Teela (and, later, She-Ra) was the tough, independent woman born in Lois Lane and given superheroic realization in Wonder Woman. Battle Cat was a bestial version of the loyal kid sidekick, like Robin or Bucky. Skeletor was the wannabe evil master of the world in the tradition of the Red Skull and Lex Luthor. As characters, they were still as much stereotypes as the action figures we played with were prototypes, but there was enough raw material there for us to work with.

        He-Man’s home world of Eternia was described as being a mix of medieval feudalism and high technology, ruled by Prince Adam’s parents. Teela was the newly appointed captain of the Royal Guard. Man-of-War was the young prince’s tutor (who also knew of Adam’s double identity). Cringer, a giant talking green tiger, was his cowardly and lazy pet. Castle Grayskull was at the bottom of He-Man’s power and was a sanctum sanctorum, your basic Batcave or Fortress of Solitude with a supernatural twist.

         Ellis liked the idea of basing Prince Adam/He-Man on the Clark Kent/Superman dichotomy, i.e. Clark acts the coward to prevent anyone from suspecting he is really the heroic Man of Steel, which was then the standard model for the character. I countered by suggesting that Adam instead be a raucous, carousing womanizer to counterpoint his square-jawed and serious He-Man alter ego, using irresponsibility instead of meekness as his masquerade. While I wasn’t a fan of the cowardly Clark conceit, the truth was I just thought it would be more fun to write a party boy character than a Clark-cloned party pooper.

         The sword & sorcery genre in a medieval milieu made most of the choices for characterizations and speech patterns fairly easy: stern Man-of-War, tough-talking, impatient Teela, melodramatic Skeletor, and so on. The only one who gave me a little pause was Adam’s giant green talking cowardly tiger; I knew how he would sound as the fearless Battle Cat (“Grrr! Then let us find him, man…so I may at last fasten my jaws about his foul flesh!”), but I couldn’t nail down Cringer. What does a giant green talking cowardly tiger sound like, anyway? Eventually, I found a role model in an earlier big cowardly cat, actor Bert Lahr’s portrayal of the Cowardly Lion from 1939’s The Wizard of Oz.

Four months after their debut in DCCP #47, the Masters of the Universe showed up in a self-titled insert running in most of DC’s November 1982 titles. Under a cover blurb promising “Extra! Free 16-page comic preview Masters of the Universe,” Superman once again found himself dragged from Earth to Eternia to help He-Man in his battle against Skeletor. Regular Superman artist Curt Swan pencilled the first two appearances (inked by Mike DeCarlo and Dave Hunt, respectively), but it was another veteran artist, George Tuska (inked by Alfredo Alcala and Rodin Rodriquez), who penciled the three-issue Masters of the Universe miniseries that followed (December 1982-February 1983).

         Masters of the Universe had been an interesting little side job, sort of a cross between my regular comic book gigs and the advertising/promotional “custom comics” projects I sometimes wrote. I certainly didn’t expect it to take off the way that it did; most of these things, if they succeeded at all, usually had a fairly short shelf life. I also never expected that my contributions to the mythos would survive the decades along with it.

         By the way, that day Dave and I were shown those Masters of the Universe prototypes? My He-Man beat his Skeletor so bad…!