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 ...