Today, we look at how Snout Spout proved himself to be a worthy warrior and ally of He-Man and the other heroes of the Masters of the Universe.

In every installment of I Love Ya But You’re Strange I spotlight strange but ultimately endearing comic stories. Feel free to e-mail me at brianc@cbr.com if you have a suggestion for a future installment!

Every year, I do a 1990s-themed feature for my pal, Albert Ching, on his birthday. However, I considered doing a Snout Spout feature for him, as well, but went with "instant mullets" instead. But I can't lie, I now had Snout Spout stuck on my brain, so I just had to do a post about his first comic book appearance in "Eye of the Storm" from the He-Man line of mini-comics.

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WHAT WERE HE-MAN MINI-COMICS?

Amusingly, Cartoonist Kayfabe just did a post on these mini-comics, so they do a good job discussing them if you want to check that out here. But to just briefly detail the idea, it is really not far off from what comic book fans were already familiar with from the late 1970s and the launch of Micronauts and Rom. Obviously, toy companies thought that having a comic book promoting its toys made a lot of sense, but Mattel went one step further with its Masters of the Universe toy-line by actually producing mini-comics that would be included with its toys, that would give you backstory of the figures that you are playing with. Don Glut wrote the initial group of mini-comics (with art by Alfredo Alcala) and therefore, he sort of built a lot of the mythos for He-Man with those comics.

There was a Filmation cartoon series, of course, that became a big hit, but the mini-comics were their own thing at first. DC was going to do a He-Man comic book, so DC took over production on the second wave of mini-comics but eventually I believe Mattel did them in-house (with Lee Nordling as editor and Ron Cook as art director). Various notable comic book creators worked on these mini-comics over the next few years, like Gary Cohn, Mark Texeira, Steven Grant, Bruce Timm, Stan Sakai, Christy Marx and many more. Eventually, the mini-comics were brought more in line with the cartoon, but were still sort of their own deal, especially by the end of the line of mini-comics, when the cartoon was no longer on the air, when the Masters of the Universe toyline was falling apart, going from $400 million in sales to $7 million in a single year between 1986 and 1987.

With that all in mind, let's take a look at the mini-comic book debut of...Snout Spout!

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HOW DID SNOUT SPOUT PROVE HIMSELF WITH HIS, WELL, SNOUT?

Eric Scot Frydler wrote the comic, which was called "Eye of the Storm," and the art was by Jim Mitchell and Tim Luth (Stan Sakai lettered it).

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This comic, right off the bat, ties in with two of the major problems with writing and drawing a toy mini-comic back in the day, which is namely that A. you have to promote the toys they tell you to promote, even if the toys never actually come out and B. you are sometimes stuck with early designs of characters.

We see this from the fact that He-Man and Extendar are playing a game that was intended to be an actual game that Mattel would sell, but that never came about (there were a few He-Man related products from this period that just never came to fruition as Mattel was saying, at the time, "Let's just mass-produce tons of He-man stuff! No one will EVER get sick of He-Man! He will live forever!")...

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and then we see Snout Spout for the first time in the story and he is wearing a firefighter-themed outfit, which turned out to not be his final design. This was early concept art...

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In any event, as you can see, Snout Spout apparently is Eternia's head of its fire department, but he is so used to hanging out with badass warriors like He-Man and Teela that he is feeling down on himself. I sort of get it, but at the same time, geez, dude, you get that firefighters are really important, right? It's not like he's Eternia's gossip columnist. He has a real purpose that he should be proud of doing.

Anyhow, Skeletor and Webstor (sadly not Webster, as that would have been a cool crossover) develop a machine that can create a storm and they set it upon He-Man and his buddies.

It shows up (Extendar is very helpful by extending his neck to say, "It's hot." Thanks, Extendar. Really useful power there, buddy) and He-Man is luckily able to fight off some of the magical properties of the storm but it is still getting pretty rough. Luckily, Snout Spout then shows up and uses the water in his snout to extinguish the storm (how that works is beyond me)...

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Is his "nose hose" connected to some water supply? Or is it from his own body's water resources? Inquiring minds want to know what your deal is, Snout Spout!

He then uses his nose hose again, and man, this dude is spraying a TON of water! Where is it coming from?!!?

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He also has an interesting way of talking. He grabs Webstor and has him in the air and Webstor yells at him to let him go and he says, "Hey, whatever you say" and drops him on top of Skeletor.

Now that he's saved the day, Snout Spout feels good about himself (unlike when he was just fighting fires and saving lives that way, as that's just sucker work) and the story ends on a comic book version of an old TV freeze frame...

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If anyone has a suggestion for a future I Love Ya But You're Strange, please drop me a line at brianc@cbr.com! Happy birthday, again, Albert!