Sketching monsters for the upcoming Doctor Baer video game. Artist Drozd is pleading with Writer Drozd not to make some of these guys asymmetrical. It’d be so much easier if we could just flip this guy’s side view!

I try to go to the Wooly Pig Farm Brewery at least once a year. Out in the hills near Coschocton, OH, where I get almost no cell service, this place is a peaceful haven where I can spend an afternoon drawing without purpose or distraction. It can be healing to make art that isn’t “content.”

Though during this last visit I did spend some time making development drawings for the upcoming Doctor Baer game:

And the third Doctor Baer story:

At the time of this writing I have 20 pages of pencils, 24 pages of inks, and 30 pages of colors left in The Case of the Mummy Express. And while this is a shorter story, and I love working on it, I am ready to make some other art. Maybe I should say I’m ready to explore story concepts, character voices, and themes again. Making the artwork is fun, but it’s only one part of what keeps comics interesting for me.

I’m longing for that confusing and delightful bit of puzzling through the narrative and expressing it in sketchbooks and thumbnails. It’s the piece of the process that’s harder to measure or spreadsheet. It feels more mysterious and emergent. Lately my work has been more of knocking pages out and checking the boxes on the spreadsheet. Again, it’s lovely work that I’m grateful to do, but it doesn’t always carry the romance of the chaotic early stages of a story.

That’s the journey, though–the early stages are full of potential and hope. The story could be anything, and you have all these big feelings of what it could and should be. But as you make the thing it becomes more and more specific, and there’s a kind of grief you experience in saying goodbye to what it could have been just as you celebrate the birth of what it is.

Speaking of art becoming more of what it is, game development art will be coming! Rob Stenzinger, my partner in making the Doctor Baer video game, has a Discord where we’ll be sharing development updates. Join us there for sneak previews of the game as we build it.

Svengoolie night means watching Godzilla films and glazing new talismans for the Doctor Baer store. Hope to release these later this summer.

Comments are off on my site, but you can share your reactions over on the Doctor Baer Discord.

• Learn more about The Inscrutable Doctor Baer and the Case of the Two-Faced Statue
• Suggest a topic for TPD here
• TPD theme music by Eliott Drozd
• Intro VO by Tara Platt

SPOILERS below!

Headline: I had more fun watching it than I thought I would. The machinery of Hollywood is not built to create art for sensitive little dorks like me. What I love about He-Man is informed by my own challenging childhood and the time I encountered the property. My pal Ben Hatke sums up my feelings about the character very well in this short video essay, actually.

The film makers had no obligation to serve my specific tastes in making this movie–I’d argue it’d be a bad business move. So I went in with low expectations. As long as He-Man wasn’t shown as a dour, resentful hero who has to kill a guy in order to achieve some imagined narrative payoff, I’d probably like it fine. And I liked a lot of things in the movie. Duncan was great, Roboto was great, Adam/He-Man was great. And, as much as I don’t like seeing Jared Leto in movies, Skeletor was a lot of fun. Seeing the various henchmen portrayed so close to the original ideas was lovely to see on a big screen. They didn’t put Orko in it as comedy relief, played by Jack Black or Chris Pratt. What a relief!

But then we get the complicated feelings: The whole piece felt like it’s trying to be two opposing things at once. It’s playfully “faithful” to the images of the toys/cartoon of the 80s, but the playfulness is constantly undermined by a laughing disavowal of the ideas they’re paying tribute to. It’s a celebration that simultaneously elbows us as if to say, don’t worry, dudebros, his gentleness is only talk! Kindness is for wimps and phonies, right?

Context: I spent a handful of years making a podcast with my buddy Hoover about the 1980s Transformers cartoon, in which I repeatedly made the claim that this series of 30-minute toy commercials were made by people who, for the most part, respected kids and sincerely wanted to entertain them. When you watch interviews with the folks who worked on the original cartoon at Filmation it’s clear that they really respected their audience. It wasn’t just a response to angry parents and political groups that He-Man looked for nonviolent solutions to problems–they believed it was their responsibility as creators of children’s entertainment that they present positive ideas. Those ideas were very influential in my own journey.

So it was both tantalizing and disappointing to see how they played it both ways with Adam/He-Man’s approach to solving the conflict in the movie. Adam is sent to Earth as a child and grows up to work in a human resources organization with an emphasis on conflict resolution. Neat idea, I thought–this gives us a clear path to how he brings a more caring approach to the inevitable conflict with Skeletor. But we never see Adam show how good he is at that job. In fact, his boss is shown to be a bit of a phony who uses HR speak to conceal her hostility towards him. When he gets to Eternia and faces his first villain it feels like a gag when he rolls out some deescalation techniques. He gets thoroughly beaten until he finally activates the Power Sword and beats everyone up.

But later he talks to Duncan about his desire to find a way to solve problems by talking to people. He says he doesn’t like to fight.

Then he rushes off to save his parents from Skeletor. He beats the living heck out of a lot of bad guys. Stabs them in the stomach. Throws them into lava. And in his anger, someone he cares about gets killed.

Okay, I thought. He’s discovering there’s a Problem with Power.

Now he’ll come into the third act with a more synthesized approach that recognizes how the strongest person in the room has a moral responsibility to be the gentlest.

They kind of do that…? After another big fight with Skeletor, He-Man puts his sword down and trots out another deescalation technique that sounds like any you might have heard at a mandatory employee training day. And Skeletor naturally responds with sarcasm and violence. We get about 7 seconds of genuine trying to talk it out before He-Man “reasons” there’s nothing left but to beat Skeletor up. What follows is, I imagine for a lot of people, a cathartic scene. At least He-Man didn’t smile as he smashed up Skeletor’s face.

After a thorough thrashing, Skeletor relents. He’ll talk now. But He-Man says…ugh…

…he says, the time for talk is over. And he crushes Skeletor’s Havoc Staff.

Okay, I think. They’re doing an Avatar: The Last Airbender thing. He’s taking Skeletor’s power away from him so he can’t hurt anyone anymore. Skeletor will be taken to the prison mines and whatnot. This still works. But no, Skeletor dies when you destroy his staff.

Hooray…?

If you’re not sure why this bothered me, go watch Ben Hatke’s essay on He-Man or just watch this episode from the original series.

The movie wants to have it both ways. He-Man says he doesn’t like fighting, but he solves all his problems with fighting. In exposition they acknowledge that some fans love He-Man for presenting a surprisingly healthy image of masculinity, but in narrative they play the traditional action-hero-hits-the-guy-until-he’s-dead idea. The most powerful man in the universe couldn’t find a better way to solve conflict than to eradicate his enemy.

Don’t you dare come at me with the notion of it being more realistic or necessary to kill Skeletor–we’re talking about a story about a guy in furry underpants named He-Man.

Look, it’s a miracle that this movie is as good as it is. It’s pretty entertaining. It genuinely celebrates a very silly toy and cartoon. I did have fun watching it. I just wish we were culturally further along in how we explore masculinity and conflict in adventure fiction. (Insert plug for The Inscrutable Doctor Baer and the Case of the Two-Faced Statue, which is my response to that problem.)

I’m not telling anyone to like it or not like it. He-Man isn’t mine. But I can have my own relationship with the property, and I always have the old shows to go back to. It can be whatever it wants to be for whoever wants to meet it where they are.

Oh, and it needed 2000% more Battlecat!