Not comics: Skeletor Has No Friends

Regardless of the quality of this summer's new Masters of the Universe movie, it definitely ushered in a flood of related merchandise. And given that the film is based on a toy line, one suspects that doing so was likely always a part of the point of producing the film in the first place. While I have long since grown out of the demographic to play with or collect the toys, I did find this one tie-in of interest: Writer Robb Pearlman and artist Andrew Kolb's picture book Masters of the Universe: Skeletor Has No Friends (Mattel Press; 2026), with its intriguing title and its cover image of the franchise's villain rendered in such a way that he is at once abstracted while some of his attributes are exploded.

What grown-up fan of the 1980s toy line-turned-cartoon could resist finding out what sort of story might lie beneath a cover like this?

As it turns out, Pearlman and Kolb present He-Man's archenemy and would-be tyrannical world-ruler Skeletor not so much as a villain or even a bad boss, but more of a bad friend, in a story which filters the familiar characters and settings of Eternia through Kolb's highly simplified and stylized art style.

Pearlman's word choice continually couches this actually gentle story about the virtues of being nice in the language of villainy, so that the narration, and Skeletor himself, both sort of insist on their overall badness, in a humorously defensive, "thou doth protest too much" kind of way.

"One gloriously gloomy day on Snake Mountain," the book begins, "the Evil Warriors were passing the time in between their evil schemes by playing a relaxing—yet evil—game of UNO."

Do note the reference to Skeletor and his allies as "Evil Warriors", with capital letters, just as they were traditionally denoted on the back of the packaging the action figures originally came in...and on the backs of the little storybooks and comic books that were boxed with them. 

Also, it was on this first spread, with its first-page mention of UNO and second-page image of Skeletor and his warriors all sitting around a stone table with UNO cards in their hands (below), that I flipped back to the title page to see if UNO, like Masters of the Universe, was owned by Mattel. It is.

Those warriors, by the way, are Beast Man, Evil-Lyn, Trap Jaw and Mer-Man...and Panthor, Skeletor's purple panther mount (the plastic toy of which was coated in fuzz), is seen napping in the corner). The designs, as you can see, are all great. 

While the toy line gave all the characters one of two basic body shapes (one for the male characters, another for the few female characters), Kolb's designs here are all quite different from one another, from a Beast Man who is pretty all torso and arms, with a tiny little head set in the middle of what looks like a spiked carpet draped over his shoulders and teensy tiny little legs, to a big-headed, skinny Mer-Man (I'm actually kind of surprised to see Mer-Man in here, as he wasn't in the movie, like the rest of the Evil Warriors here. Oh, and speaking of Mer-Man, note that in the image above, all of the characters have empty glasses in front of them...and Mer-Man has five, one imagines due to his aquatic nature. That's a nice, subtle detail). 

Skeletor has but one card left in his hand and is thus on the cusp of victory. He has only to wait for Beast Man, who is spending an inordinate amount of time thinking about which of his many cards to play. Beast Man eventually lays down a "Draw Bajillion" card. (I assume this isn't a real card, as I don't think "bajillion" is actually a real number. But then, I haven't played UNO since high school.) 

"This is an outrage!" Skeletor shouts, using his Havoc Staff to flip the table, blast everyone out of their chairs and send the cards flying. "How dare you keep me from my triumph!"

Evil-Lyn argues with sore loser Skeletor—"You can't keep expecting us to play with you, or follow you into battle, if you're mean to us," she says—before eventually leaving with Beast Man. There's a page with a three-image sequence in which Skeletor asks Mer-Man and Trap Jaw if they are leaving too, and they take turns telling him off. (Kolb subtly changes the expression on Skeletor's...let's say "face"...in the sequence, as he goes from confidently angry to somewhat surprised, even hurt.)

This leads to a passage in which Skeletor is forced to realize what it's like not to have any friends/henchmen, as he tries (and fails) to right the heavy stone table by himself, tries (and fails) to make "a deliciously evil grilled cheese!" and so on. He even has a plan to use a "Destructive Device" to "unleash chaos on Eternia", but is unable to activate it, as it requires pushing two launch buttons on two different computer consoles on other sides of the room. 

He then magically remembers "happy memories of him and his friends" which, amusingly, are a series of memories of times in which he ran away, leaving his "friends" in peril. Here's that spread, which, like the image of the UNO game above, I swiped from Amazon:

Due to some further magical shenanigans, the others see him admit that he's sad without them. "I like being evil," he says. "But I don't like being evil alone. I...I wonder if they'd come back if I promised to be a little nicer?"

They decide to give him another chance, and he struggles for several pages to be a bit nicer and more welcoming, even catching himself from calling them "fools," changing it to "fine folks" in mid-sentence. 

Once all is (temporarily...?) forgiven, Skeletor asks, "Now, would you all like to go capture He-Man...together?"

And thus we get a great double-page splash ending (this is from Kolb's website, and is thus missing the words that appear on it in the book proper):

Skeletor and his Evil Warriors are depicted charging from the right page at He-Man and his allies—Man-At-Arms, Teela, Orko, Ram Man and Battlecat—charging from the left. This is the only appearances from the good guys, but Kolb's versions of them are also quite fun. He even, and I am shocked to be typing these words, manages to make Orko look genuinely cool. 

The final words impart the moral: "That day, Skeletor learned the only thing better than being evil, was being evil with others by his side."

So yeah, no matter how bad a bad guy you are, it pays to be nice. 

Two of my nieces and my nephew are now too old for this book, and my other niece is still too young for it, so I don't have any little kids to run it by. But it sure seems to be a perfect example of that double-address one finds in all of the best all-ages works, with the basic story directed at younger readers, but with irony and meta-jokes there for the adults who will be reading the book to their kids (Perhaps, if their kids like it well enough, every night for months). 

I certainly enjoyed seeing Kolb's inspired, storybook take on the characters. 

And I hope whoever makes the next Masters of the Universe cartoon or feature film sees his long, lithe, creepy Orko, and uses that for inspiration...

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You can see a few more pages from the book here at Simon & Schuster's website.

Or, better yet, here at Kolb's website. Do take some time to click around his site, as he draws a lot of comic, cartoon and video game characters. And if his name sounds familiar (or his art looks familiar), well, he drew a couple picture book tie-ins to past Spider-Man movies. I wrote about Spider-Man Swings Though Europe here and Spider-Man's Very Strange Day! in this post.