He-Man Week: Important PSA — Contrary to the Meme, Fisto Never “Fisted” Anyone

When asked what my first comic book was, I usually answer “X-Men (Vol. 2) #8.” That is the first X-Men comic I read and the one which started my lifelong comic book passion (I’ve read every issue of X-Men since). In truth, there’s a few other comics I read before that one, comics I simply came across in various random places like toy stores or grocery stores during the time when comics weren’t just limited to specialty shops, comics which I read but which never quite got me hooked on the form.

There’s Transformers #31 (a comic I still think about every time I go through a carwash), New Defenders #129 (my first encounter with the New Mutants) or Robocop #5 (the Robocop Industrial Complex of the late 1980s/early ’90s was wild). But while I never really realized it at the time, the real first comics I ever read were the Masters of the Universe minicomics.

He-Man was the first pop culture love of my life, before Star Wars or G.I. Joe or Transformers or the X-Men, and with every Masters of the Universe figure coming packed with a little comic book, those toys also served as my introduction to commercial sequential art (non-picture book edition). While I don’t know if “The Clash of Arms” is actually the first He-Man minicomic I read, it’s certainly the first one I remember reading. It came packed in the third wave of figures in 1984, when I was three, and was included with Clawful, Evil-Lyn, Fisto, Spikor and Jitsu, all figures I owned. Notably, it’s also the source of one of the more infamous He-Man minicomic panels … at least amongst certain corners of the internet.

In “The Clash of Arms,” Fisto, riding the mechanical horse Stridor, is jumped by a quartet of Skeletor’s goons and taken before Skeletor, who, in true ’80s villain fashion, makes him fight for his life in the Circle of Doom (’80s villains loved making heroes fight in an arena for their amusement). Fisto heroically holds his own for as long as he can, but eventually is overwhelmed by Whiplash’s tail. Just then, He-Man arrives, having been alerted to Fisto’s predicament by Stridor. When He-Man rescues him, Fisto declares, according to many images found across the internet, “I fisted hard, He-Man, but I could not fist them all!”

If you’ve hung around certain corners of the internet, you’ve undoubtedly come across this panel/meme at least once or twice. See, it’s funny, because this is a character with an unintentionally-sexual name designed to sell toys to kids unknowingly using a term with further sexual connotations! It’s like that old issue of Batman where Joker commits a bunch of boner crimes and it’s funny because that word has a different meaning today than it did back in the ’50s!

Except, that’s not what’s actually in the minicomic. Fisto never says he “fisted hard,” etc.

If you crack open Clash of Arms (or read it digitally online or in the Dark Horse Comics minicomics collection), you’ll see the original panel on page 13 of the comic:

Somewhere along the way, someone replaced the words “fought” and “defeat” with “fisted” for comedic value, and then the panel got passed around the internet, and now people see it and say it without realizing the original lettering is altered.

Now, to be clear, I don’t intend to suggest any malice aforethought to whomever originally altered the panel. Nor am I the first person to point out that the panel in the meme is altered/not from the actual minicomic; Brian Cronin debunked it in his Comic Legends Revealed column back in 2020, and the He-Man-centric Battle Ram blog frequently makes a point to remind people the “fisted” panel is a fake. I also have no problem laughing at juvenile jokes (the boner stuff in the Batman comic is pretty funny).

But I appreciate that sort of thing a lot more when it’s a genuine case of something being taken out of linguistic context, and not something actively manipulated into being out of context. There’s certainly plenty of unintentionally-funny material to be found inside the He-Man mythos without having to make stuff up (I mean, the character’s name is genuinely “Fisto,” and that’s worth a chuckle).

The altered He-Man/Fisto panel also remains a common meme floating around the internet, and in this era of AI-generated images and deepfakes, it never hurts to have another voice in the chorus out there reminding people what is true and what is not. Which, in this case, is the fact that no, He-Man’s friend Fisto never actually talked about fisting in a highly-suggestive way inside a comic book packed in with a children’s toy.