Ender Bender 18: Chapter 11, "Veni Vidi Vici" (Part 1)

Graff is worried that the battle schedule they've developed for Ender will burn him out. He says not one word about any of the kids under Ender's command, even though they presumably have the same schedule. As we all know, it's the commanding officers who work the hardest in war. There's that System of a Down song about it (2023 Tom's Note: I honestly have no idea what I was referencing here, but apparently at one point I knew a third System of a Down song). They also talk about how Russia is afraid of some Internet trolls destabilizing world governments and boy was it nice when that kind of thing was limited to dystopian science fiction novels.

Once we get past the ping-pong dialogue bit, we learn that Ender has been training his army in an unconventional way, breaking them into small groups with individual leaders that could act semi-independently, like some sort of chain of command. It's a brilliant idea that only a ten-year-old brain genius or literally any high school band director could come up with. Ender wonders why this happened.

Did they give him thirty Launchies, many of them underage, because they knew the little boys were quick learners, quick thinkers? Or was this what any similar group could become under a commander who knew what he wanted his army to do, and knew how to teach them to do it?

I think it's telling that both of these options center Ender. Either he's been assigned kids who are just really good at learning the way he was, or he's just so good at teaching that he could make any team just as effective in a similar amount of time. The possibility that his team members are contributing something to the process never merits serious consideration. 

They're assigned to battle Rabbit Army, and naturally they dominate over the veteran team.

Even with less than four weeks together, the way they fought already seemed like the only intelligent way, the only possible way.

The entire enemy team is frozen, while Ender's army is mostly unscathed. Before he unfreezes Rabbit Army, he assembles his team in formation to win the psychological victory. 

They may curse us and lie about us, but they’ll remember that we destroyed them, and no matter what they say other soldiers and other commanders will see that in their eyes; in those Rabbit eyes, they’ll see us in neat formation, victorious and almost undamaged in our first battle

This is, as it has been since the battle with Stilson, and as it will be through the end of the book, Card's most deliberate theme: Don't just beat your enemy, but beat them down, so they never even think about fighting again. It's the lesson that the teachers deliberately want Ender to learn, and in a more competent book, there might be some point where Ender repudiates it, but that never really happens. The book consistently validates this approach to warfare on both the large and small scale, in such a way that becomes utterly incoherent once you consider even some of the implications. But hey, let's leave something for the wrap-up posts.

He wages a similar psychological battle on his army as well, playing the hardass commander but telling his subcommanders to be lenient, as a way of binding the groups together. This is, ultimately, similar to what he did with Bean last chapter, giving the soldiers a common enemy to unite against. It's nice that he's putting himself in the line of fire here, but since we haven't heard anything about Bean yet this chapter, it feels like picking a teacher's pet and then directing the soldiers' ire at the teacher is likely to just make things worse on him.

And then there's this normal thought that a normal person would have:

He washed himself twice and let the water run and run on him. It would all be recycled. Let everybody drink some of my sweat today.

Hashtag just shower thoughts. 

There's some more training, Ender goes to lunch at the commanders' mess hall for the first time because it's been his first victory, which raises the question of where he's been eating for the last month, but apparently this is just how it works. More worldbuilding-by-retcon. Lunch is for winners. Naturally, he's at the top of the scoreboard. He has a conversation with Dink Meeker that causes Ender to question whether or not his friends are still his friends now that he's a hotshot commander. 

That's the problem with winning right from the start, thought Ender. You lose friends.

"We're going to win so much, you're going to be sick and tired of winning."

Meanwhile, the Rabbit army commander, Carn Carby, stops by to be a gracious loser again and shower Ender with some more praise. 

"I'll try," Carn Carby left, and Ender mentally added him to his private list of people who also qualified as human beings.

Deciding which people are worthy of being considered human? Well, that's definitely a good look that won't later look bad in light of some kind of genocide. 

Speaking of characters who are treated as second-class humans, Petra Arkanian is here. She deliberately ignores Ender all through Commander Lunch, and then the next morning he gets a last-minute announcement that he'll be battling her army. And here's where things get extremely frustrating, because Ender talks about how he was a member of Petra's army up until he received his command four weeks prior. 

We spent a fair amount of time with Bonzo and Rose the Nose, and how Ender chafed under their incompetent leadership. But then there's Petra, who by all accounts is clever and effective, who Ender considers a friend and a competent leader. He even almost gives her partial credit for how good Phoenix Army is:

Partly because of Ender's influence, they were the most flexible of armies, responding relatively quickly to new situations.

See, Ender's army is good because Ender is their commander. And Petra's army is good because Ender was a part of it, but also Petra being commander probably has something to do with it. Anyway, so much of these chapters have been belaboring Ender's lessons about what good leadership looks like, but when he finally gets a good leader? It merits two brief mentions three chapters ago, with nothing even approaching detail. We're told that Petra is one of a very small number of girls good enough to get into Battleschool (indeed, she's the only one we've even heard mentioned). We're told that commanders generally get some choice of soldiers, meaning she either deliberately picked Ender after watching him train launchies after hours or didn't ask to trade him when he was assigned to her. We're told that her army is really good and that she recognizes Ender's skills enough to make him a (sigh) toon leader. 

He spent at least half a year under her command, in an army that becomes so good it comes closer to beating Ender's than any other (which is still not very close), and none of his experiences, nothing that he learns merits a single mention.

But when Ender's army beats hers, well...

Petra was not gracious about bowing over his hand at the end, either. The anger in her eyes seemed to say, I was your friend, and you humiliate me like this?

Ender pretended not to notice her fury. He figured that after a few more battles, she’d realize that in fact she had scored more hits against him than he expected anyone ever would again. And he was still learning from her. In practice today he would teach his toon leaders how to counter the tricks Petra had played on them. Soon they would be friends again.

He hoped.

She's just irrationally angry, everyone! But it's okay, once she sees that she's the best of the people losing to someone who was her subordinate a month ago, all will be forgiven. Ender assumes.

Nothing about this makes any sense, not Petra's anger and apparent feelings of betrayal, not Ender's optimism that she'd be his friend again in the end. Part of that is because Petra hasn't had a line of dialogue since Chapter 7—the chapter that introduced her—and that doesn't change here. A competent writer would have realized what an important moment it would be for the story for Ender to have an effective commander, one he considered a friend, after a string of people who underestimated or loathed him. A competent writer would have given us character interactions to illustrate how Ender being subordinate to Petra might have strained their friendship. A competent writer might recognize that Ender and Petra both belong to marginalized groups in this world—Petra being a girl, Ender being a Third—so both have to be ten times better than everyone else just to be taken seriously, and that this could be a common experience that they bond over but also something that creates conflict when they’re pitted against each other. A competent writer would have laid some groundwork for this interaction, but Orson Scott Card mentioned Petra in passing once or twice in the last four chapters and then gives us this moment where a friendship that's been an afterthought at best breaks for no clear reason besides Petra being irrationally emotional and unable to see the bigger picture. 

And it all happens without her saying a word. Ender needs no input from her in order to perfectly interpret her state of mind. Our omniscient narrator, everyone.

Oh, and he trades some more barbs with Bean that clearly upset the younger kid. Leadership!

After seven straight days of victories, Ender is beloved by some commanders and reviled by others, but he's clearly better than all of them.

A few of them sat with him at every meal, carefully trying to learn from him how he had defeated his most recent opponents. He told them freely, confident that few of them would know how to train their soldiers and their toon leaders to duplicate what his could do.

And I'd like to contrast that quotation with this one: 

There were many, too, who hated him. Hated him for being young, for being excellent, for having made their victories look paltry and weak.

Yes, that's why they hate you, Ender. Because you're young and excellent and better than them, not because you're a condescending, supercilious ass who deliberately tries to demoralize your opponents. Like, Ender acts like he knows that the purpose of Battle School is to turn out precisely one Perfect Chosen General who is better than all the others. And narratively, he's right, just as Hogwarts was designed to facilitate the adventures of one Chosen Doofus and his pals, but it doesn't make sense for the character to behave like he knows that's the case. If the school's understood goal is to produce the leaders of the army that's going to protect the human race, wouldn't it make sense for him to try to train the interested commanders hard enough that they could understand his methods and communicated them to their soldiers and toon leaders? Wouldn't that be a natural evolution of the leadership he showed as a soldier, training interested launchies in his free time?

 

But why bother with character development when your character is already perfect?

Ender Bender 16: Chapter 9, "Locke & Demosthenes" (Part 3)

I never thought I'd be relieved to be following Ender's exploits again. 

Nothing was different, nothing had changed in a year. Ender was sure of it, and yet it all seemed to have gone sour.

Ender and his friends have risen up in the world, even the teachers respect him, but he's sad because none of his peers treat him like a peer. Gosh, maybe it's because he's spent the entire time that he's been here in Battleschool acting like he's superior to everyone.

So he wallows in self-pity, then plays his video game. Orson Scott Card invented GamerGate.

Some dwarves have made a village out of the giant's corpse, but Ender just can't figure out how to get past the castle at the End of the World, where he always sees his brother's face and he always dies. Card may have been able to predict 4Chan, but he couldn't predict GameFAQs.

And just like that, we're back to Valentine. Military officers are at her school, and she's afraid that her secret identity's been exposed. But no, Colonel Graff has come at great expense to ask her why Ender keeps seeing Peter's face in the computer game. In the future, the Internet and Message Boards exist, but not Skype (2020 Tom's note: this paragraph was written in 2018. Readers in 2020 should substitute Zoom in this very timely technology reference). The fact that the Colonel is asking Valentine about a game she's never played and a brother she hasn't had contact with in years is lampshaded, but Graff threatens the Wiggin family if she doesn't share her insights.

So Valentine relents and describes Peter's bullying and manipulation tactics, and his threats to murder his siblings. And then she falls into a shame spiral about how she's been pulled into Peter's plans and abandoned Ender, in case you wondered whether the other female character in this book has any individuality beyond her relationship to male characters. Graff convinces her to write a reassuring letter to Ender, to tell him that he's not actually like Peter, which would likely be more convincing if she knew about what Ender's been doing that makes him feel like he's going down that path. There's a bit more of "the military is mean and unfair and shitty for no reason," but Valentine eventually gives in because she's ultimately kind of spineless and there's a "you can't fight city hall" message woven throughout this book.

Which is maybe the part that feels the most out of place from a 21st century standpoint. For all that Ender's Game presaged the world of modern YA, with fantastic schools where exceptional young people are sorted into competing teams and get caught up in a larger conflict, most of them involve some degree of rebellion against an oppressive state. Even the Harry Potter series—and I think there are a lot of comparisons to be drawn between Card and Rowling both as writers and as people—which is ultimately about protecting and maintaining a rightful state system, has the heroes fighting back when that system is corrupted. But in Ender's Game, at least this first book, for as sinister and incompetent and oppressive the government systems are, no one ever even discusses overthrowing them or rebelling against them. "The adults are the enemy," but unlike every other enemy in this book, no effort is made to fight them, let alone leave them so completely destroyed that they do not try to start another fight.

Maybe that's later in the series? I doubt I'll ever know.

So Ender reads the letter. She calls Peter a "slumbitch" and misspells "psychoanalyze" in ways that are apparently distinctive to Valentine even though we've never seen her do any of those things in the book up 'til now. They're payoffs to things that have never been setup, callbacks to details that were never called forward, like so many of the moments in this book. We get some waffling about whether or not Valentine actually wrote it and whether or not it matters because it wasn't her decision to write it and it had to have been approved by the military, which leads us right back into how the military is bad. And look, I'm not unsympathetic to that point of view, I just think I come to that conclusion from the exact opposite position as Card.

Ender cries, then loads up his video game, and for the first time in awhile I feel a sense of verisimilitude. Been there, buddy.

He decides he's not going to play their games anymore and so he plays their game some more in protest. But this time he doesn't kill the snake, he kisses it, and then it turns into Valentine and kisses him back. Instead of Peter, the mirror shows them their fursonas, and then they get to advance past the room where Ender had been stuck.

2020 Tom's note: There's no way it actually gave Ender and Valentine fursonas. That was a joke I came up with in 2018, clearly.

She arose from the floor of the tower room and walked to the mirror. Ender made his figure also rise and go with her. They stood before the mirror, where instead of Peter's cruel reflection there stood a dragon and a unicorn. 

Huh. Orson Scott Card predicted FurAffinity.

Valentine gets a letter from the Strategos, and I don't think we've been told before that his name is Shimon Levy, which feels oddly reminiscent of the "male witch" Isaac Horowitz from Christian rapper Carman's "Witch's Invitation." I suppose it's not so much offensive as stereotypical, but boy oh boy. Anyway, Valentine wins an award for her assistance to the war effort, but won't actually receive it until the war is over. She's angry at how she's been used and goes passive-aggressive through her online avatar, and god I hope this is the last I have to read of this plot cul-de-sac.

2023 Tom's Note: it's not!

Ender Bender 15: Chapter 9, "Locke & Demosthenes" (Part 2)

In this chapter, Orson Scott Card pioneers trolling, sockpuppeting, and catfishing.

No, seriously. Valentine and Peter get access to the unrestricted Internet and immediately begin creating anonymous accounts with fake identities and getting into debates.

At first Peter insisted that they be deliberately inflammatory. "We can't learn how our style of writing is working unless we get responses—and if we're bland, no one will answer."

That's, like, the textbook definition of trolling from back in the Usenet/BBS days, before it just meant sending death threats to trans people.

The feedback they get helps them make their writing sound more adult, and once they do that, they can properly catfish the world's leaders. Their literal stated goal is to generate memes that influence global political agendas and eventually become so Internet famous by staging arguments with each other under their titular pseudonyms that by the time anyone figures out they're a couple of kids, nobody will be able to stop listening.

Orson "Lowtax" Card.

Valentine's character gets an offer to write a column for a west coast newsnet.

"I can't do a weekly column," Valentine said. "I don't even have a monthly period yet."

Well, it's true, they sure don't talk like real kids.

Valentine doesn't like the way Peter's forced her character to be a "fairly paranoid anti-Russian writer," so I guess Orson Scott Card invented Louise Mensch too. Look, folks, I was not at all prepared for this chapter to be so relevant to 2018. (Future Tom's note: this post was written in 2018. For 2020 readers, feel free to update this trenchant political reference to Rachel Maddow, I guess).

Way Future Tom's Note: Obviously I wrote the preceding paragraph in 2018 and revised it in 2020. I thought about re-revising it, but the political landscape regarding Russia has become so completely different since 2018 that there's not really a way to salvage the joke. Like, all the "fairly paranoid" types now are on Russia's side. What a difference a few years makes. I leave the unedited paragraph for you as an exercise in joke archaeology.

And when Valentine stands up to Peter?

"Are you sure you're not having a period, little woman?"

Father Wiggin likes the cut of Demosthenes's jib, and Valentine's upset because she was sure only an idiot would agree with the ridiculous strawman arguments she puts into Demosthenes's articles. Arrogant teens starting accounts to troll people under the names of long-dead philosophers, and older generations falling for obvious strawman political accounts is so prescient it hurts my teeth.

Locke gets a column in a New England newsnet, Peter talks about the Wiggin kids' collective pubic hair, and oh dear I've thrown my iPad across the room.

Future Tom's note: there's no way that's actually in the book, right? I would have remembered that, right?

A few days later Locke got picked up for a column in a New England newsnet, specifically to provide a contrasting view for their popular column from Demosthenes. "Not bad for two kids who've only got about eight pubic hairs between them," Peter said.

Oh.

 

Way Future Tom's Note: You can tell this is bit is from 2023 because it's an I Think You Should Leave reference. I recently scrolled through the reviews for Ender's Game on The Storygraph, and I just can't get over, especially in our current age of moral panics from the Puriteens and the anti-"Groomer" crusaders, how nobody seems to remark on the abundance of gross lines and creepy moments in this extremely popular book. I am increasingly convinced that more recent printings have edited out some of the more egregious content, because it feels like the only rational explanation beyond the entire world conspiring to gaslight me about a bad sci-fi novel from the '80s.

Ender Bender 14: Chapter 9, "Locke and Demosthenes" (Part 1)

God, could you have a more pretentious chapter title?

Says the guy whose NaNoWriMo novel chapter titles were all quotes from T.S. Eliot poems. Glass houses, Tom.

This chapter is another eight pages longer than the last chapter, and it's an interlude following Peter and Valentine. And they're talking about global politics. Combining the politics of Orson Scott Card with the politics of preteens is truly a heretofore undiscovered circle of hell, way to go. 

So our opening dialogue between people who are still unnecessarily unidentified explains that Ender is so good at computer games that he found a place that wasn't programmed!

And since the game is designed to be a mind game for the specific player, we get some thrilling conversation about the possible symbolic meanings of the levels. It's always good to have your characters trying to analyze the text in the text, right? That's why there's that conversation between Nick and Gatsby where Jay's like "hey, man, I think you're putting me on an unreasonable pedestal and overlooking my flaws in much the same way that I do with Daisy oh wait I need to rethink some things."

Anyway, they also talk about how the game is connected to the Future Internet and pulled up a more recent picture of Peter from the Guilford County North Carolina school system, and that's the first of a couple of times that this chapter decides to get really, really specific about geography. Once the chapter starts in earnest, we learn that the Wiggin family has moved to Greensboro, North Carolina, which is, entirely coincidentally, also where Card lives. It's fine to set stories in real places and to pull from real-life experience when you're writing, but it's weird to start developing this sense of place when you're more than halfway through the book. 

I've talked about this in earlier posts, but going back to read the book all in one go made the problem so apparent that it's hard to believe there's any other explanation: I don't think Card ever went back and changed anything significant in earlier sections once later sections were written. He talks in the introduction about "the necessity of being harsh with your own material, excising or rewriting anything that doesn't work" and that he "fix[ed] the errors and contradictions and stylistic excesses" of the first edition, but I see little evidence of that. What I see, throughout an introduction where his smarmy self-assuredness reminds me of no one so much as Dilbert scribe Scott Adams and throughout a text where he is constantly introducing plot elements only immediately before they are relevant rather than when they might more naturally occur in the narrative, is a guy who can't be harsh with his own material because he can't recognize when something doesn't work (or when something else might work better). 

The establishment of the Wiggin home only after they have moved is like so many of those details, ones that could have easily been dropped in description or flavor text or exposition sometime earlier, but instead end up in awkward "as you know Bob" paragraphs peppered through the text. It's hard to see these as any kind of deliberate stylistic choice; like the ever-increasing chapter length (two thirds of the chapters make up roughly half of the book's overall text), it feels like a matter of poor planning or poor editing, or both. 

Moving to Greensboro was meant to be therapy for Peter, hoping that nature would curb his violent impulses. The degree to which authorities are aware of Peter's violence varies wildly throughout the book; here, it's severe enough to uproot the family but also nobody ever really follows up on it. Much of this is chalked up to Peter's manipulativeness, but it ends up being one of a variety of places where we just have to accept that the Wiggin kids aren't just gifted, aren't just mature for their ages, but are vastly more intelligent than everyone around them. It's one of several places where some Ayn Rand seems to seep through the text, not just that the vague eugenics of the Genetically Perfect Chosen One narrative, but the sneering contempt for anyone outside of an elite inner circle. 

Anyway, instead of getting better, Peter is ticking off the serial killer checklist by torturing and dissecting various woodland creatures. He's also a student of Google University, and beloved by the faculty as a result, which is probably a consequence of this book being written before the modern Internet. A violent reactionary conservative teenager who thinks he knows everything because of what he's read online? Oh yeah, that's every teacher's favorite student.

We're told that Peter studies the "binding of cells into organisms through the philotic collation of DNA," and...

 

Okay, I know, criticizing the science fiction book for its fictional science is nitpicky. But the thing is, we know how cells bind together. We know how DNA works. Neither of those things was particularly mysterious in 1985. The "philotic" thing is Card's Unobtanium; we learn later that it's the branch of physics derived from studying Bugger tech that allows for faster-than-light communication and gravity manipulation. And I don't really have much problem with any of that (though I think the term is goofy and an otherwise-mostly-hard-SF book like this one could have more easily gotten to this point through discussing existing physics concepts like quantum entanglement and gravitons). My problem is invoking it to explain something we already understood. It'd be like Qui-Gon saying that the Midichlorians are what allow people to tap into the Force and are what keep the planets in orbit around the sun.

With an interminable back-and-forth, Peter explains that he's decided not to kill Valentine because Russia is mobilizing their military, in advance (he thinks) of some change in the Bugger War that will lead to a dissolution of the tenuous world peace. Between this and Watchmen, it's interesting that "an alien invasion is all that can bring the world's governments together peacefully" was apparently such a common idea in 1985.

Peter points out that he and Valentine don't think or talk or write like other children, hanging a lampshade on the obvious. If there were any children who did talk or write like other children in this book who could provide a contrast, this might be interesting. Instead, it just feels like it's handwaving how every character has the same damn voice.

Long story short, Peter is good at intimidation, Valentine is good at persuasion, and Peter wants her help to say the right things to the right people to preserve world peace, because on the Internet nobody knows you're a dog or a 12-year-old psychopath.

Also, they call it "the nets," and that is hilarious.

Valentine's internal monologue lays the entire exchange out on the table, analyzing her character and Peter's so that the reader doesn't have to.

In a way, she actually preferred Peter to other people because of this. He always, always acted out of intelligent self-interest.

And...

"Think what Pericles did in Athens, and Demosthenes—"
"Yes, they managed to wreck Athens twice."
"Pericles, yes, but Demosthenes was right about Philip—"
"Or provoked him—"
"See? This is what historians usually do, quibble about cause and effect when the point is, there are times when the world is in flux and the right voice in the right place can move the world."

Keep quotes like that in mind when I bring up the deeply conservative, anti-intellectual, Ayn Randian influences on this book in the wrap-up post.

There's no need for metaphor or interpretation because Card tells you the exact subtext and context for every line of dialogue, and exactly what Valentine's motivations are and what she thinks Peter's must be, in enough detail that it occasionally reads like Vizzini working through the Iocane gambit. It's thoroughly telling-not-showing, and it would have a greater impact if it left something up to the reader. For all that this book is praised as not talking down to gifted kids, it sure does hold your hand through any situation that might have any ambiguity to it.

Which brings us back to the conversation at the beginning, where two characters analyze the text so the reader doesn't have to. No sense trying to imagine what a character's motivation is, they'll tell you, and if your point-of-view character doesn't know for sure what another character's motivation is, they'll exhaustively examine all the possibilities. It's like the book is reading itself for you.

Hey, remember in the introduction when Card scoffed at critics who thought "anything that the general public can understand without mediation is worthless drivel"? When he said that he "designed Ender's Game to be as clear and accessible as any story of [his] could possibly be"? This, I think, is what he meant. He didn't set out to avoid allegory and dense symbolism—quite the opposite, given all his bloviating about military history and the great generals who inspired the story. He didn't set out to tell a complete and clear story that was compelling even if you didn't understand the deeper layers. He set out to tell a story that left nothing to chance, that spoonfed every bit of meaning to the reader so they couldn't possibly miss the meanings and messages. It's a story that doesn't trust the reader to get anything that isn't explicitly stated. 

It's extremely condescending. Which is ironic, given that the book is often specifically praised for not talking down to its reader base. 

Guttor #5 - You Can't Do That on Television!

As someone whose main connection to the Masters of the Universe franchise is through the original cartoon, it was a breath of fresh air to be able to crack this first Marvel/Star issue and read dialogue that felt like it was in those familiar character voices. It's not completely consistent on that front, but the characters feel right to me in a way they didn't in the earlier stories. 

But, like the DC Comics, this series exists in its own strange liminal space. Sure, it draws mostly from the cartoons in terms of characterization and design, but occasionally a location or a character looks like the toy version instead of the animated version. 

Toy Snake Mountain...

...and cartoon Eternos...

...and a kind of hybrid Grayskull, with the toy playset's handle visible.

This series started in 1986, while new episodes of He-Man and the Masters of the Universe had ceased production the year before, and instead She-Ra: Princess of Power was the spotlight series for new toys in the sibling lines. As a result, the new characters introduced in this Filmation-inspired setting—which is to say, the new toys that get a spotlight—are ones that only showed up on She-Ra's cartoon, if at all. Which results in strange things like stories that reference Etheria, She-Ra's adopted homeworld, but not the Princess of Power herself.

And, to be clear, that's how it was in the toy pack-in minicomics as well. Hordak and the Horde come from Etheria, but any other denizens of that world are unmentioned. That’s one of several reasons why this series feels like extended versions of the minicomics—right down to getting more creative with the storytelling and continuity just before they end. 

The consequence is that characters like Hordak, Stonedar, and Rokkon get three separate introduction stories between the Marvel/Star comics, the minicomics, and their spotlight episode of She-Ra. Meanwhile, Extendar’s appearance in these pages feels like a follow-up to his minicomic origin. 

Basically, if you think Donna Troy and Hawkman are complicated, try making sense out of He-Man’s continuity.

These first issues follow a story structure that would be familiar to viewers of the cartoon: there’s a scene early on with Prince Adam and Orko, where Orko demonstrates some childish character flaw, the inciting incident occurs, and then the resolution requires Orko to acknowledge and overcome his mistakes. With that in mind, these should go fairly quickly. 

Issue #1 introduces us to Hordak, and does a pretty solid job of making Hordak seem like a serious threat—Skeletor is afraid of him, and decides he needs to break into Castle Grayskull so he can increase his power to keep Hordak away. To do this, he breaks out the Terror Claws!

Which are considerably less impressive than their toy counterpart. 

Though using them to basically try to dig through the wall of Grayskull like a skull-faced mole certainly is an interesting application of the accessory. 

Meanwhile, Adam and Teela are training, and this is one of those instances where Adam is the one being irresponsible. Orko’s magic goes wrong, endangering Adam when he tried to help, but there’s no time to dwell on that because the Sorceress shows up in her guise as Zoar to summon He-Man. 

One thing that really stands out about Ron Wilson’s art in these issues is the transformation sequences; being freed from the confines of Filmation’s budget restrictions means we get to see new variations on the transformation, and every one of them is stunning. 

He-Man, Battle Cat, and Orko race to stop Skeletor, and the interaction is actually pretty good, with Skeletor treating He-Man as an annoyance rather than a threat. For once, his plan to take over Castle Grayskull isn’t so he can defeat He-Man, which changes the dynamic. 

Skeletor manages to capture Zoar, and Orko uses a spell to summon additional help, which turns out to be exactly the boost Hordak needs to break through Skeletor’s protective magic. 

The Horde attacks He-Man and Skeletor, which puts them both in the unfortunate position of being on the same side.

Orko eventually puts his spell from earlier to better use. 

This is notable, because the structure of subsequent issues will make “Orko learns a lesson” pretty central to each plot, but it doesn’t quite gel here in that same way. We come back to his original problem here and at the end of the story, but not in a way that feels like a problem’s been resolved. 

Skeletor challenges Hordak to one-on-one combat, so Hordak teleports everyone else to the prison in the Fright Zone on Etheria, where no one has ever gotten out alive! But apparently no one had thought to just cut through the wooden bars of the prison cell before.

It’s implied that maybe the further traps our heroes encounter are the really deadly threats, but they’re all dispatched fairly quickly, and then Orko teleports them back to Eternia. 

Skeletor and Hordak battle…

…but Hordak gets the upper hand, until our heroes—including a cavalry in the form of Man-at-Arms and Teela—arrive to turn the tides. 

Hordak runs away, and Skeletor follows suit, but we haven’t seen the last of them. 

Next!

In issue #2, Orko screws around and causes the Laser Bolt (one of my personal favorite He-Man vehicles) to go haywire, which shoots a meteor out of the sky. Adam, Cringer, and Orko investigate, encountering the Evil Meteorbs for the first time.

I like Gore-illa's little pirouette.

It is wild to me that two entirely different toy companies decided in 1986 that the best way to compete with Transformers was to introduce figures that turned into rocks or eggs. Were the Rock Lords the direct inspiration for that scene in "Big" where they have a skyscraper Transformer? Both the Meteorbs and Rock Lords use Bandai figures, but He-Man's Rock Warriors are their own thing. 

And the thing that Orko shot out of the sky is secretly the Rock Warrior Rokkon, a real "4:59 on Friday" name. 

Turns out Rokkon, like Orko, just loves to fool around and have fun, and that's what got him hurt. He-Man sends the Rock Warriors and the Heroic Meteorbs to a rendezvous at the Palace, but Skeletor and the Evil Meteorbs are invisibly lying in wait, and attack the newcomers. They retaliate, thinking the attack came from the palace, and Man-at-Arms re-retaliates, escalating things until He-Man arrives. Neither side will relent until Rokkon and Orko use their combined abilities to reveal the actual threat, uniting the heroes against a common foe. 

It's at this point that I should probably point out that all these rock creatures come from a planet they call Granite, which I have to imagine was only in order to make this joke:

The villains are defeated, and we get a nice sitcom ending. 

Issue #3, inexplicably titled "The Garden of Evil," begins with Adam and Orko sparring. Orko expresses jealousy about the Power Sword, especially after Adam is able to use it to turn his magic back on him. 

Meanwhile, Hordak is assembling an army of robotic Horde Troopers to travel to Eternia and bring back He-Man. Instead, they capture Adam, which leads to a very interesting scene that I don't think happens elsewhere in the mythos:

So, first, we have direct confirmation that despite appearing similar to the viewers, He-Man and Adam look nothing alike. But we also have confirmation that He-Man's sword is distinctive enough to be recognized by Hordak.

Back in the day, I proposed two different headcanons about these issues, the first somewhat tongue-in-cheek, the second very serious. For the first, I suggested that cultures on Eternia and Etheria both lacked commonplace stories about characters with secret identities, or even characters in disguise. For whatever reason, it just wasn't part of their shared story traditions. This would help to explain why every disguise on either world, no matter how flimsy, always seemed to be almost completely effective. It would also fit nicely with my belief that Queen Marlena definitely knew that Adam and He-Man were the same person, since she's from Earth where we are all about people in disguise.

The more serious theory is that the reason no one notices that He-Man and Prince Adam have the same sword is because the Sword of Power is so plain, like the Holy Grail in "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade." While we don't see any swords exactly like He-Man's in the series, the basic sword design we frequently see is similar enough that you could understand why someone would mistake the two, especially if they've only seen it in fast-paced battle situations. 

The Sword of Power

Similar to, but legally distinct from, the Sword of Power

Hordak tries to take the sword, but it defends itself, so he sends Adam to the Slime Pit, a torture chamber where...eventually he'll be covered in slime!

Like, the slime isn't poisonous or anything as far as I can tell. Adam just gets to experience what it's like to be to be on the Nickelodeon Kids Choice Awards. For comparison, here's what happens when He-Man gets slimed in the mini-comic:

That red-eyed mind-controlled He-Zombie is burned into my brain. According to the footnote in the Mini-Comic Collection, this was the intent for victims of the Slime Pit. 

Meanwhile, only Cringer and Orko know what's happened to Adam, but Orko knows that they don't need help to save him. They travel to Etheria and find Adam trapped, but Adam tries to warn Orko not to touch the sword. 

Orko, though, has other ideas...

...but instead he decides that his magic is good enough, and levitates the sword over to Adam, who gives very little thought to his secret identity. 

Or Cringer's, for that matter. 

Not that it matters, because Hordak is kind of an idiot. He shows off a couple of additional toys, but there aren't enough pages left, so Orko teleports our heroes back to Eternia. He-Man compliments Orko on making a mature decision, and the story ends. 

To sum up these first issues, I think the strong focus on spotlighting several specific toys each issue—the Terror Claws, Horde members, and Fright Zone in #1; the Rock Warriors, Meteorbs, and Laser Bolt in #2, and Hurricane Hordak, the Mantisaur, the Slime Pit, and Horde Troopers in #3—is a big part of what makes these stories feel more like the mini-comics than the cartoon. While the cartoon certainly existed to sell toys, most episodes were less transparent about it, or at least wove them into the plot more naturally. Some of that is down to the amount of space for storytelling, some of that is from animation budget restrictions that limited how many new designs a given story could have, but I think it ended up working in the show's favor.

Next time, issues #4-6!

Guttor #4 - Enter...The Marvel Age!

Before we dig into the series proper, there was an issue of Marvel Age promoting this series, including an interview with the creative team written by Sholly Fisch, who has apparently had a much longer history in comics than I was aware of. There’s not a ton to say about the interview; it feels very effusive in that promotional enthusiasm sort of way. 

The issue starts with a note from editor Jim Salicrup about why Marvel features so many licensed characters on Marvel Age covers. In short, comics based on licensed characters bring in a new audience:

When Marvel buys the rights to license characters from a movie, TV show, or even a toy, we usually try to find characters that are incredibly popular—that have a huge following of their own. That way, when we publish the comic book based on such a character we're hoping to reach thousands of people who may not have picked up a comic book in years!

That passage starts with a potshot at their competition, which is both kind of funny since He-Man started at DC, and kind of fitting since (for whatever reason) DC didn't hang onto the license. 

Before we cover the cover feature, there's an issue I need to head off at the pass: Mike Carlin is the writer on the first eight issues of this series, and I feel like I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention his history as a (credibly alleged) sexual harasser. It sucks, and if I’d realized when I started this project that he was the main guy for a bit here, I might have had second thoughts. 

Fisch begins with a brief summary of the He-Man concept and characters, then gets into an interview with writer Mike Carlin and penciller Ron Wilson, who had previously been working on Ben Grimm's solo title, and editor Ralph Macchio. "He-Man will be a mixture of fun and adventure that won't just be for kids!" Fisch says, (the "biff! pow!" is presumably implied) before Carlin promises not to "write down" to the readers. That's a comment I'm going to come back to over Carlin's tenure on the book, because so far in my reading, it feels like it's increasingly untrue as the series progresses. 

Macchio compares Wilson's art style to Jack Kirby and John Buscema, which is high praise that I'm not sure comes through in this series. Then there's this baffling comment:

While it [Wilson & Janke's art] will be slightly different from that of the HE-MAN cartoons, it will be every bit as down to earth!" 

Nothing says "down to earth" like the show about a man in furry shorts fighting a skull-faced wizard for control of a castle shaped like a head. 

Carlin compares the simplicity of the He-Man comics to Silver Age storytelling, with "clear-cut stories without plot complications that carry on for years." He also says that the biggest shift from previous collaborations with Wilson is that now Carlin is doing full-script with panel layout thumbnails, presumably in contrast to a more Marvel Method approach to The Thing. I wonder if this change was necessary in order to get stories cleared by the people at Mattel in a timely fashion. Macchio discusses later how the stories have to be cleared by Mattel, something that's true even with modern licensed comics, but "so far, the stories have been so good that Mattel hasn't asked for any major changes!" 

Unspoken in that is how much input Mattel had on the stories before they were written, particularly in terms of which characters/vehicles get the spotlight in each issue. I suspect the answer is "a great deal."

The sample sketches Wilson did were apparently good enough that Mattel wanted to hire him on the spot. 

And then Fisch goes into a description of upcoming issues, including erroneously claiming that #2 introduces the Slime Pit. That would end up being the story for issue #3, and #4 has a slight credit change, with Wilson on breakdowns and Dennis Janke finishing, which makes me wonder what behind-the-scenes shuffling and deadline stuff was going on. 

The meat of the exuberantly effusive article (wherein nearly every sentence and quote ends with an exclamation point) ends with the claim that "Ralph was so overcome talking about HE-MAN that he leaped on his desk, pulled out a tennis racket, and cried, 'By the power of Cresskill!' (invoking the name of his hometown)." I'm trying to pinpoint exactly what makes me feel like that story absolutely did not happen as described, and I think it's the tennis racket. 

Fisch ends, as each episode of the He-Man cartoon does, by offering a moral:

Listen to your mother and father, brush your teeth after every meal, look both ways before crossing the street, never take candy from a stranger with a blue hood and a skull face, and most of all, accept no imitations!

I'll follow suit by offering this moral: sponsored content and promotional writing hasn't really changed in 30 years. Reading that gives me flashbacks to the SEO-infused content I was once paid to write for online stores. 

The next article in the issue is a promo for Doctor Who Monthly, published by "Marvel's British division," and then a new talent spotlight for the late, great Tom Lyle. 

Huh, I did not expect to fill a whole installment of this with just the Marvel Age promo, but here we are. Next time, we dig into the wild world of Marvel's Star imprint. 

Guttor #3 - Within These Pages...Confusion!

I'll give one thing to DC Comics Skeletor: he's a quicker study than the animated version.

Turns out that searching for the Power Sword and trying to take Grayskull hasn't been working, so Skeletor decides to kidnap the Sorceress Goddess and make He-Man find the Power Sword instead.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Masters of the Universe #1 came out in August, 1982, the month after the Preview insert. Paul Kupperberg returns as writer, with George Tuska on pencilling duties. Mini-storybooks artist Alfredo Alcala is back to ink the first two issues, with Rodin Rodriguez taking over in #3. Adam Kubert and Ben Oda are our letterers, and Adrienne Roy and Anthony Tollin are the colorists. Getting Alcala back, even just for inks, really does make a difference; he brings a Prince Valiant quality to Tuska’s pencils in the first issues, which is lost a bit in Rodriguez’s cleaner style. Tuska definitely feels more suited to this setting than Curt Swan did; much as I love Swan, this era of Masters of the Universe really lives in a more brutal, Conan-inspired place than what would come later, and that’s just not what Swan’s classic superheroic style is best at.

Our story begins at another party, where Prince Adam is continuing with that playboy lifestyle, though we get explicit confirmation that this is at least in part an act.

I think this is a really interesting hook for the character, even if it clearly wasn’t very sustainable for a children’s property, particularly one as beset by watchdog groups as Masters of the Universe. The alter ego with a different personality from the hero is nothing new in superhero comics, and we’ve even seen characters like Batman playing the carefree Casanova, but Adam feels a little distinct here, characterized closer to Johnny Storm than Bruce Wayne. Usually the immature, impulsive character who’s always thinking about the opposite sex is played straight, as character flaws that the hero genuinely needs to overcome; it's less common to make those the hallmarks of his secret identity.

Adam gets attacked by demons in his bedroom, and finds Cringer when he hides under the bed, which is a solid gag. We never do find out what the demons were doing there. They rush off to the Goddess's magic cavern, where they are transformed—but find Skeletor instead of the Goddess (who is occasionally also called the Sorceress in the story). Skeletor has imprisoned her, and will only release her if He-Man retrieves the Power Sword for him, which the Goddess has hidden away. In order to find the sword He-Man will need to find three talismans (talismen?) representing the sea, the sky, and the cosmos. 

It's a fetch quest to start the fetch quest. Not the most auspicious start to a series. Or end to one.

He-Man returns to the palace, where we get confirmation of something that fans have always speculated about: do He-Man and Prince Adam really look that similar? In the DC Universe, the answer appears to be yes:

It also plays into a longtime fan theory that Queen Marlena knows Adam's secret. Now that he's back to the palace, He-Man seeks help from the palace wizard, Tarrak, who is being attacked by demons himself! 

He-Man, Teela—wearing for this issue only a sword-and-sorcery standard metal bikini—Battle Cat, and Man-at-Arms manage to defeat the demons, but not before they take the cosmos talisman. Meanwhile, the Bird-People of Avion are attacked by a squad of Beastmen, who are after the sky talisman, which Stratos wears. Stratos seeks help from He-Man, and with Tarrak's assistance, the heroes set off to find the other two talismans. 

This specific outfit and pose feels so familiar.

He-Man and Battle Cat head into the jungle, where they meet a clan of barbarians that He-Man has encountered before, in what feels like a nod to his classic origins. He-Man once helped them battle a sexy evil wizard named Damon.

The barbarians know where the cosmos talisman is, but before they can retrieve it, the group is attacked by demons again. He-Man takes the talisman, and is transported away. 

Out in the Sea of Blackness, Man-at-Arms, Teela, and Stratos are looking for the sea talisman, which is being held by the Mer-People. Fortunately, Tarrak gave them potions so they could breathe underwater. Mer-Man leads a fight against them, because this version also has ambitions of his own, until Skeletor pulls a Darth Vader from a distance. Teela is less than grateful, so Skeletor leaves them to the mercies of the Mer-People.

Just going to admire how great Skeletor looks in that first panel for awhile.

But Stratos claims the sea talisman just in time, and the whole crew is transported into a Steve Ditko drawing. 

They get attacked by demons again, but are saved by Zodac, who refuses to give them any information about the person sending the demons, but a page later we learn that it's the wizard Damon, who wants the Power Swords so he can control Eternia, not that dimensional-carpetbagging wizard-come-lately Skeletor. He's gotten considerably less sexy and more...problematic since that brief appearance in the previous issue. 

Seriously, he looks like the antisemitic caricature from that Carman video. He also happens to be right next to where the Goddess stored the two halves of the Power Sword, but they're in an impenetrable force field, which is not mentioned again. 

Zodac uses the talismans to open a portal to the Sword's location (sort of?) and then gives them to Zoar the poorly-drawn falcon before sending the heroes on their way. 

Feels like the reference got away from you a bit.

Meanwhile, Damon decides to tip his hand by attacking Skeletor, who lashes out with magic that is strong enough to teleport them both into Castle Grayskull, just as Damon had planned. But in a pretty great moment of both villains trying to two-steps-ahead each other, that was all part of Skeletor's plan, and he apparently kills Damon. 

These comics go pretty hard for stuff that was based on toys for babies.

Also, this happened earlier in the issue.

The heroes also end up in Castle Grayskull, which is apparently where the Power Sword is, even though we already saw Damon with the Power Sword before he was able to access Castle Grayskull.

You and me both, He-Man. The heroes split up to search the castle. Stratos gets caught in a giant spiderweb, Man-at-Arms gets blown up by a tripwire, and Teela ends up in a hedge maze until she stumbles on Skeletor, who pulls the Power Sword out of a magic warp. 

He-Man shows up shortly after, but Skeletor sends Beast-Man (singular) and a monsterized Man-E-Faces (who was briefly introduced earlier in this third issue) against the hero. Eventually He-Man, Teela, and Zoar get the sword away from Skeletor, and then the Goddess appears to say "actually I wasn't in any danger, but your friends are all caught in booby traps." The End. 

What an absolutely bizarre miniseries. It feels like it was initially intended to be four issues and cut down to three, but that change had to be made before the first issue—with its "Mini-Series 1 of 3" banner—went to the printers. The promotional push makes it seem like DC was intending to do a lot more than three comics and a handful of mini-comics. Editor Dave Manak speculated that there might have been an issue with contract negotiations, but I'd be really interested if there's a clearer answer. Every aspect of the DC Masters of the Universe license feels abnormally cut off, right down to the end of this story. 

Whatever the reasons were, this would be the last full-sized Masters of the Universe comic from DC for almost 30 years. Next time we'll pick up with the Marvel/Star Comics.