Teela Masters of the Universe

Captain of the Royal Guard of Eternia, and the one member of the court who could reliably out-fight the men she was busy giving orders to. She appears here in her familiar warrior guise — the coiled serpent headdress with its raised cobra hood, the strapped cuirass and greaves of Eternian palace armour, and a weight-forward fighting stance rather than a static display pose. She belongs to that particular slice of early-eighties Saturday morning television where the toy line came first and the mythology was invented to justify it, and she has aged rather better than most of the cast around her. For collectors assembling a shelf from the He-Man roster, the Captain of the Guard is close to essential; a display group of Eternians looks conspicuously incomplete without her standing in it, and she gives a painter far more to work with than the palette-swapped henchmen do.