Ladybird Books, £0.70, ISBN 0-7214-0859-1
Fantasy, 1984
The Iron Master is another hilariously stupid entry into Ladybird’s Masters of the Universe line. Still, we get to meet Ram-Man, although he’s kind of useless here.
Some of the locals have been injured, and they turn to the royal palace for help. Naturally, He-Man realizes from just a glance that the attacks are perpetuated by Beast-Man and his minions, and he must make those evil furries pay for harming the “simple” farmers. Yes, he calls them that. I guess when you are a member of the royalty going on luxury cruises and all while your serfs live in ramshackle wooden houses, you get to call them simple—after all, it’s their fault for not organizing peaceful riots all over Eternia in protest of the grave discrepancies between the rich and the poor.
He-Man must have forgotten that he has awesome strength, again, because he is easily overpowered by those malicious furries. Alas, Beast-Man injures his hand bad when he caresses He-Man’s huge, jutting sword of power. Seeing this on his apparently always-on satellite channel or something, Skeletor realizes that he too won’t be able to touch He-Man’s sword. Well, no matter, he has his minions craft this huge robot, called the Iron Master of course, to go grab He-Man’s sword and bring it back to him.
What follows is something that could be a lovely horror story if this thing weren’t meant for parents that wanted to believe that their children are fragile flowers that will never want to read anything violent or scary. The Iron Master goes on a rampage, terrorizing the serfs and all, and apparently there is not even a militia to protect these people. Never mind, He-Man is here to… oh wait, he realizes that he can’t deal with that thing on his own, because the story needs cameos. So, he summons Teela, Ram-Man, and… ugh, Stratos.
When they realize that the Iron Master wants He-Man’s sword, Stratos takes the sword and flies off to the volcano, and of course he does an oopsie and drops the sword. God, he has only one job—just one job—and still he mucks that up. The Iron Master grabs the sword and holds it aloft in an awesome action shot, and then, oops, lightning strikes it again and again and it’s dead. He-Man recovers the sword, because apparently its power is too strong for the “evil” Iron Master to overcome, and that’s the end.
I think this is the first story which sees our heroes be 100% useless and still win the day.
I don’t know what to say. Why don’t they just go to the volcano and directly drop the thing if they knew that the sword could withstand anything and everything? At least then, Stratos could be able to keep his dignity intact just once, but no, they have to make him take the sword and then mess up in a way that could have spelled disaster, if lightning hadn’t literally struck after that. Teela, He-Man, and Ram-Man are just here to go along for the ride and witness Stratos’s humiliation. So yes, this is a story where mother nature wins the day for the good guys. How wonderful.
The saving grace for The Iron Master is the awesome artworks. There are many great action shots here, and the ones with Iron Master are positively epic for a book in this line. This is one gorgeous illustrated book, and sadly, the artwork is far more impressive than any of the words present to fill up the empty spaces below each artwork.
