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The He-Man Big Babol Adventure!

Did you know that they publish He-Man comics here in India? I literally jumped for joy when I saw this. They don't publicise it or anything, but it's there! The stories in these comics are not bad; they all seem to be reprints of original Masters of the Universe comics.

The only thing is, I'm not sure whether these guys really bought the rights or took permission to print this stuff here. It looks like they just scan some old 1980s MotU comics and print them out, because images in several stories seem oddly stretched, as though they're trying to cover up old advertisements. If these comics are printed with permission, it's the worst job ever. Also - and I don't know if this was a typo in the original comics as well - in one story they kept referring to Orko as "Orka".

Still, if these comics were available fifteen years ago, I'm sure all my friends would have shit their pants with excitement. I mean, this was He-Man for cryin' out loud! Just look at these frames from the comic where Skeletor has switched bodies with He-Man and is now taking a moment to hit on the Sorceress...

Pretty awesome, huh? You wanna go buy yourself a copy right now, don't you? Just to see if Skeletor and the Sorceress manage to hook up? There's a catch, though. The title is printed by Diamond Comics - the same guys who bring you Chacha Chaudhary - so you know they just won't let you have a 100% non-shitty reading experience.

You see, the comic seems to be sponsored in part by Big Babol gum. Now, in most sane societies, this would mean placing advertisements within the comic. But what does Diamond Comics do? They actually have a two page Big Babol ad starring He-Man before any of the other stories!

Now it's obvious that whoever wrote this advertisement doesn't know jack about He-Man, and have never seen the cartoons or even read the comic in their lives. We see two opposing camps... the "slaves of Skaletor" who are two walking crocodiles; and the "faithfull servants of He-Man", which is one guy in red spandex.

You see? Even if you can overlook the spelling of "Skaletor" and the shitty English that abounds, this is an incredibly weirdass story in the making. He-Man, for one, is completely out of character. "Skaletor should die or everything will be ruined!" This is a guy that spends 29 minutes of the cartoon trying to defeat Bone-face, and the last 1 minute saving his life so he can escape to do the same thing next week. But apparently two walking crocodiles were the last straw, so now Skaletor must die.

See that smiling pink ball waving at you from between frames? That's the Big Babol mascot. You'll be seeing a lot of him in these two pages. He's so commonplace that none of the other characters even notice him.

See Orko in the last frame? He gets an idea: Big Babol. That's another thing about this ad... they never type Big Babol in plain text. They always use the logo. Actually they don't use plain text anywhere in this story - it's all Comic Sans.

I'm not quite sure how they made this ad. I'm guessing they just took random images from He-Man stories, pieced them together and added their own dialogue in the speech balloons. On the other hand, the speech balloons are pretty well-defined, and the colour of He-Man's hair and armour seem a bit off, so this could actually be original artwork, or at the very least traced and re-created. Do you realise what this means? They actually sat down and wrote a story this bizzare. The comics might be printed here legally, but there is no way you can convince me that the people in charge of He-Man would let an advertisement like this be made. I won't believe it, I won't, I won't.