Presenting a story from the Masters of the Universe comic no. 28, from mid-April 1987. Probably. London Editions didn't see fit to put dates on their comics like normal comic-publishers, but no. 20 was the Christmas edition and it was fortnightly, and Easter 1987 was April 19th and there was a story with a visiting alien Easter bunny in this one (he was green and had antennae), so I think we can be fairly sure of when it was published.
Anyway, the page I'm interested in sharing is the last one, where we see one of the comic's regular one-page comedy strips that take a very long time to set up a very old punchline.
This one has always stuck with me, because Webstor is so cool in it. In the British comic, Webstor was awesome. He was the intelligent one of Skeletor's minions, and not shy about letting everyone know it. There was a great story a few issues before this one, in which Webstor and He-Man had to work together to solve an alien invader's puzzles, at the end of which He-Man urges Webstor to use his great brains and bravery for the heroic warriors. But Webstor declines, thinking to himself that he can never beat He-Man, but he's definitely got a chance of overthrowing Skeletor and taking command of the evil forces one day, so he'll stick with that. I really like this guy.
His presence even enlivens a gag like this one, which even at the time of first reading it I felt really doesn't work at all. The problem is that if you're going to tell this ancient joke, the subject of it needs to be recognisable as an animal, who wouldn't normally be expected to play 'blocker'. And Skeletor's minions are a gang of monsters and animal-creatures - M'Yower, walking around on two legs like that, just looks like another one of them. He's way too anthropomorphised for the punchline to hit home. The artist should have drawn him much more like a pet, to put the point across to the reader.
Anthropomorphic animals can do this joke perfectly well - here are my old friends Marmaduke Mouse and King Louie, back in 1946:
See - Ernie Hart knows his stuff. That's clearly a dog, while the lion and the mouse are clearly people. Webstor needs to have a word with the British comic artist, whoever it was.
