Hopefully you can’t tell, but this is an old picture. I first drew this in November of 2014, and it’s been sitting incomplete in my work folder ever since. For some reason I got the urge to come back to this one, so I cleaned up the art a bit and sketched up a background (in 2014 I was still mostly using gradients and the like). I’m actually really happy with the final result; I think it holds up better than I had originally expected.

The Master of the Universe franchise is one I’m always surprised I haven’t done more art of. This was one of my earliest cartoon relationships, and it was basically everything Dragon Ball Z is to me now before DBZ had entered my life. I was very young when I first watched stuff like He-Man, She-Ra, Thundercats and Voltron (these four shows are forever tied to my memory for that reason, despite only two of them having anything to do with one another). Perhaps it’s just how long I’ve known these shows that keeps me from thinking to draw them more often, like how I keep wanting to do more Hannah-Barbera cartoons but only seem to fart out one or two Scooby-Doo pics a year.

In 2014 I had a newfound love affair with Filmation’s cartoons. Not just He-Man and She-Ra, but also BraveStarr and Blackstar. I tried to watch some of their older action cartoons in the same vein as these shows, but for some reason had a hard time finding them (even Blackstar and BraveStarr were hard to get my hands on). I really love the corny, goofy charm of these shows, and of course the large cast of colorful characters with the bodies cut from marble. I could probably base my entire career just drawing the women of He-Man and She-Ra, if I wanted to. I really should come back to this franchise more often.