(+++) HEE-HEE MAN

The Adventures of He-Man and Porter! Skeletor Ate My Homework. By Stephan Pastis. Art by Will Henry. Mattel Press. $14.99. 

     You know something is strictly a promotional piece when the page before the title page has a copyright notice listing no fewer than 16 characters with the ^TM superscript to indicate trademark registration. As a 192-page commercial, this awkwardly titled book is actually not bad, but it is a 192-page commercial, and any adult who happens upon it without knowing what it is and what it is for is likely to end up victimized by multiple demands for action figures and/or movie streaming and/or movie-related comics and/or all sorts of multimedia connections and figures and cartoons and other stuff dating back more than 40 years to the original Masters of the Universe^TM action figures from 1982. 

     Those unfamiliar with MOTU will find nothing of interest here, except that ©Mattel clearly hopes the book – with far more humor than MOTU has heretofore possessed, thanks to silly, immature, thoroughly juvenile joke-related writing by Pearls Before Swine and Timmy Failure creator Stephan Pastis – will bring new young victims…err, interested children…into the U of MOTU. 

     The irrelevant storyline, such as it is, draws on the usual tropes of fish-out-of-water travel-between-worlds fantasy, such as they are. Porter Avery of Earth, being raised by a single father (no explanation given), falls into a box in his home’s attic (rather than, say, walking into a wardrobe cabinet) and finds himself in Eternia^TM, which is where all the action is because that is where all the action figures are, in particular super good guy He-Man^TM and super bad-but-completely-ineffectual bad guy Skeletor^TM. Various characters, good and bad, try to figure out who or what Porter is and what, if anything, he has to do with the looming battle (battles always loom, don’t they?) between the forces of good and the forces of not-good. This involves a couple of trips back and forth between Earth and Eternia^TM, for reasons best described as “why not?” The one transporting Porter^{NOT YET TM} and Teela^TM onto a swing set so Teela^TM can have an adventure tripping over just about everything in Porter’s sleeping father’s bedroom while he does not so much as stir from dreamland is but one example of easy, meaningless, mildly amusing interworld transport. 

     “Mildly amusing” is the point here, to the extent that anything has a point, or is pointed, or pointy. Humor is one characteristic that is in short supply in MOTU, and Pastis knows how to supply some at and below the Timmy Failure level by, for example, having Skeletor^TM cast as an inept corporate executive who says “My anxiety is off the charts” and “I should really start checking references,” while his henchthings warn each other that “all of this is going in your end-of-the-year performance reviews.” There is also occasional (very occasional) self-directed humor, as when Prince Adam^TM transforms himself into He-Man^TM and one of the bad guys remarks, “Well, aren’t you a beefcake?” There isn’t too much of this sort of self-amused writing, though, since Pastis is not going to risk denigrating the corporate environment by potentially undermining the underlying sales pitch for everything MOTU-related. This fantasy is, after all, something to be taken seriously in boardrooms that bear at most a passing resemblance to the castle chambers where Skeletor^TM plots his plots. 

     Pastis and illustrator Will Henry (whose work is described as “art” on the cover and title page, which is pushing the definition a bit) keep their tongues firmly in their cheeks throughout this mild romp, with words and pictures complementing each other well – as with the illustration of Man-At-Arms^TM holding pillows to his ears, telling inept mage Orko^TM that he is doing it “so I don’t have to listen to your babbling” (after which Man-At-Arms^TM compellingly argues, “LA LA LA LA LA! … I CAN’T HEARRRRRR YOU”). 

     In the end – written as “The End(?)” at the end so as to leave open the possibility of a sequel if actuarial evidence indicates a profit boost sufficient to justify whatever ©Mattel paid Pastis and Henry for this – the bad guys on Eternia^TM lose to the good guys, Porter is back on Earth and getting along better with his beleaguered and probably perpetually exhausted father, and the MOTU franchise boldly goes where every other fantasy franchise has gone before: into continuing expansion. Or so ©Mattel most ardently hopes.