He-Man Eternity War # 6

 By Mark Rodriguez

The planet goes to war as everyone is trying to get the Eyes of Chrono and Chaos to rule everything. Skeletor already had one, while Hordak had the other. After gaining the powers of Grayskull with his own Power Sword, Hordak impaled She-Ra, but before he could finish the job, Skeletor appears and takes both She-Ra and the stone. Skeletor actually wants to help She-Ra kill Hordak so when all is said and done he can quit being evil and go back to being Keldor (or so he says). Evil Lyn won't stand for this and takes the Eyes of Chrono and Chaos and runs, delivering them to Hordak himself. He-Man, determined to do 'whatever it takes' to stop Hordak, is taken to a magic door by the Sorceress. He awakens 30 years in the future where he is married to Teela, has already saved the world from Hordak, but is also ruling Eternia under his own dictatorship! Now what will happen?

King He-Man walks among the crowds as everyone seems to love and worship him, with Beast Man being his personal bodyguard. A woman in the crowd wants for him to touch her baby, but Zoar senses dangers and Beast Man swats the child down. The baby seems to be some kind of acid bomb taken form of a child (the hell?) and the woman is being dragged away as she screams 'death to the false king'. He-Man wants her head on a pike. Just then a quake rumbles across the land. A statue of Zoar falls to the ground. He-Man takes this as a bad omen and wants Beast Man to ride with him to Grayskull, Beast Man wears a cape made of Battle Cat's fur and follows suit.

As He-Man rides Panthor, he says he's tired of rebellions and demands answers as who keeps trying to disrupt the peace he has brought for 30 years. As they enter the castle he demands to speak with 'the prisoner'. There are several Sorceresses there, each one watching a mirror from different stages of He-Man's life, but even they can't see the future since it has gone dark.

The prisoner is Orko and He-Man demands to know where the rebel base is located. Orko swears he knows nothing and He-Man swears to make him and his leader pay. He-Man shows him a wall of flames, blaming him for this, but Orko says this is effect of He-Man going insane and asks what happened to Adam. He-Man raises his sword and says the name Adam means nothing to him anymore. Orko says the planet is falling apart and it's all He-Man's fault. He uses his magic to reveal that Stratos and Rio Blast were hiding there all this time, waiting to strike down the 'false king'.

Beast Man is tossed into the flames, but He-Man makes quick work of both Rio Blast and Stratos, killing them both. She-Ra flies in and tries to talk sense into his brother. She says he has gone mad with power and the reason she was given her sword was in case the power of grayskull were to fall in the wrong hands. She-Ra finally ends the madness and strikes He-Man down. However, his blood starts to spill towards the Horokoth and She-Ra is too late to stop it. The contact with the blood of Grayskull and the Horokoth caused the end of the universe as was foretold.

As our regular modern day He-Man sees this, he said he thought the final battle between good and evil would have been between him and Skeletor, not him and his sister. The Sorceress tells He-Man that what will take to defeat Hordak is having more power than he could control. More power than any one man was meant to have. Adam stayed as He-Man permanently and that eventually corrupted him, having become a dictator after having killed Hordak. He-Man is shocked to learn that the Age of the Horkoth would be inevitable, either by the hand of Hordak or by his own hand.

The Sorceress says everything ends, except for eternity, which is why He-Man was chosen to tap into the power of the new sword, the Sword of Eternity, but with that power comes a price too high to pay. He-Man says he's willing to pay the price for the sake of saving Eternia, and snaps the sword in half. Now back as regular Prince Adam, the Sorceress is happy. She says that as He-Man he defended Eternia, but now as Prince Adam, he will save it.

This is a great issue and it does bring up a point about something I have noticed throughout the series for a while. Namely, He-Man had been He-Man 24/7 and never really turned back to Adam. I remember this series started with Skeletor somehow finding out who He-Man was and making him lose his memory and just live life as a regular wood cutter guy. The mini series was about how he and Teela get closer to remembering who they are, while each of Skeletor's minions tried to stop them from getting too close. Once Adam gets his memory back and the sword, he becomes He-Man and kicks Skeletor's ass..... and it seemed to me he never looked back.

This comic addresses that after 30 years of fighting all these bloody battles as a savage warrior, the power has finally gone to his head and taken over. Adam really let absolute power corrupt absolutely, so much that after saving the world from an evil dictator, he became a dictator himself. And it is a good idea to have an extra Power Sword lying around as a back-up plan in case He-Man did ever go insane with power (though what happened if She-Ra also was evil?).

And yes, the title of this issue 'The Problem with Power' is also the title of possibly everyone's favorite episode of the classic 80's series. In that episode, Skeletor made He-Man believe that he accidentally killed someone while fighting bad guys. Afraid that he was too powerful for his own good, He-Man turned back into Adam and got rid of his sword. Now even though the guy was working for Skeletor and didn't really die, the whole concept of death (actually referring to the person having died and not just sleeping or zapped into the Next Dimension/Shadow Realm or other nonsense) was very rare back into those wholesome cartoon days. It was also the only time from the classic show that ever got to see He-Man actually turn back into Price Adam by saying 'LET THE POWER RETURN!'.

The ironic thing is, while the cartoon never went this deep into dark territory, in a way He-Man did give up his sword to prevent from someday becoming what he basically became in this comic.

The only thing I wonder is who 'the true king' is. Everyone seemed to be calling He-Man the 'false king' as if he took his role away from someone else. I guess this was due to Randor's disappearance.... because I sure don't think they wanted Hordak back.

 I honestly thought for a moment there that the comic was going to reveal that Skeletor had someone taken the form of He-Man and that the real He-Man was the 'prisoner' somehow in Skeletor's form. Something about He-Man acting so cold and cruel, and trusting Beast Man as not only his bodyguard, but also letting him wear a cape from Battle Cat's fur??? All while He-Man was riding around on Panthor? It did kinda smell like a mind and body switch to me. I guess He-Man killed most of the bad guys, but Beast Man kissed enough ass to be spared, and Battle Cat just caught him in a bad mood one day. Who knows? But this version of power-hungry He-Man that feels he's doing the right thing reminds me of the Injustice version of Superman. 

I am curious what he can do now as Prince Adam, the Sorceress seems pleased as if this is the right course of action, but whatever they're plan has yet to be seen.

On a minor note,  we get to see Rio Blast in action for a few seconds. It would make sense for some of the Masters to rise up to stop He-Man, and while we've seen Stratos in action a few times, Rio Blast is one of those more obscure characters we haven't seen yet. He came out pretty late in the line so he was never in any of the cartoons, I think he came out the same time Ninjor did. Who knew Eternia had cowboys and ninjas too? They were running out of ideas back then I would say, but yeah, they never used Rio Blast, not even in the 2002 remake.

Also a chimera acid bomb? What the hell? But then again this is 30 years in the future. Let's see what awaits us in the next issue.