Issues #1-6 of Masters of the Universe volume 3 were published by MVCreations in 2004. These issues were written by Lori Ann Scott, Emiliano Santalucia, and Val Staples, and illustrated by Santalucia and Enza Fontana. Here, Evil-Lyn is critically injured in an attempt to free Hordak, and King Hsss seeks the means by which to unleash the god Serpos.
This six-issue arc takes place between episodes 38 (inclusive) and 39 of the cartoon, and fleshes out that story in some interesting ways. The authors do a good job in the first few issues with Prince Adam working through his moral obligations, and the story is well paced even with so many factions involved.
There are backstory problems, though. Most significantly, in issue #5, the presence of King Hsss with Keldor and baby Evil-Lyn in the Faceless One’s biographical flashback explicitly contradicts a long imprisonment for Hsss. And goodness, the Council lets Serpos rampage for quite a while before getting involved.
The Santalucia-Fontana art is quite strong, as always, and their action, faces, attention to detail, and retro touches (see, e.g., their Council of Wisdom in issue #5) are highlights. The backgrounds here are omitted more frequently than we’d care to see, but not to a substantially damaging degree.
An interesting production note: in the first several issues, there are ads for issue #5 (and later, issue #4) with a cover featuring new characters; these characters are never seen, and no issue was ever printed with that cover. It has since been well documented that for copyright and trademark reasons, the comic production team was extremely limited in what they were able to do, and that included introducing new characters.
On the whole, this is a quality companion story to the cartoon, and it’s too bad that this King Hsss arc was essentially the last hurrah for both.
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