I hate to have to come back to this topic, but I have the right to defend and protect myself from the incorrect and false statements that Mr. Val Staples published on October, 6th on the He-Man.org forum.

These statements by Mr. Staples contain subtle and not so subtle accusations to me about Illumina and why she is not available to be made as an action figure in the Masters of the Universe Classics line by Mattel. All of his comments and accusations are meant to simply deflect fan's blame to me, while the only person responsible for Illumina being off the table right now is indeed Mr. Staples himself.

The reason that I am the only owner of the character and her story is simply because I never had a contract with MVCreations and Mr. Staples.

In the world of freelance work, vendors are contracted to execute projects. The art created, and its intellectual property, is immediately transferred to the company. Contracts exist to protect both the vendor and the company, to make sure that everything is agreed on beforehand.
Of course, if I draw a sketch of He-Man, it doesn't mean that I own He-Man, but I still own that sketch. While I can't use it as it still portrays someone else’s IP, its existence does not automatically give the company owning He-Man the rights to use my sketch. To do it, they'd have to pay me and have all the conditions regulated by a contract.
Without a contract specifically stating that the rights to the work done is no longer property of the vendor, but is forever assigned to the company, the vendor will keep ownership of his work and keep rights for any usage that is made of it. Anybody telling you otherwise simply doesn't know what they are talking about.

I worked for Mr. Val Staples for years without a contract. It was his responsibility towards Mattel to put me under a contract, to protect Mattel and make sure that Mattel owned all the art I created for MOTU during my tenure as a freelance artist for MVCreations. Mr. Staples failed to do that, and as a consequence, I still maintain rights to everything I created during that time. He cannot provide any evidence that says otherwise, except for a generic Non-Disclosure Agreement that contains an assignments of rights clause that is too vague to have any effect. Two legal firms went over this and confirmed that MVCreations needed to have a contract specifically stating the assignments of rights for my MOTU work.

This includes the creation of Illumina.
That is not a claim, neither is it something against Mattel. It is just the pure legal consequence of Mr. Staples' lackadaisical business' practices. Despite all this though, I am always willing to work everything out with Mattel, and to make Illumina available to them. That is all there should be to say about this subject, but for those curious about the details, here are Mr. Staples recent posts at He-Man.Org:

Today a group of dedicated fans, lead by Eric DeLima is celebrating Illumina day, an event dedicated to the character I created for the Masters of the Universe 2002 comic vol. 3, that unfortunately was part of a storyline we had to scrap due to the legal constraints we faced as the line was coming to an end.
Fans would like to see Illumina released in figure form at one point, and while Mattel doesn't currently own the rights to her, I like many others, hope that one day maybe a reconciliation could be reach and me and Mattel will find a way to work together to make a figure of her

In the meantime, I wanted to offer to all the fans that supported my creations for such a long time, a glimpse of something never revealed before.

When we began work on Vol. 3 of the comic, I was asked to come up with the story plot. So I wrote a very rough draft for the first few issues, loosely describing the action and what topic we would have covered.
This draft was later reworked, but the following is an extract from my original document, where Illumina makes her very first appearance!

"We see SK and EL in the library of Zalesia  where they have spent hours looking in the books an scripts but none of the them  contains more information that vague legends and myths (we could start to throw in more about Eternia’s past here) but nothing about Grayskull. It seems that everything has been erased on purpose!
SK is furious because he thinks he has been tricked by the FLO.
On the floor of the Library is painted a map of Eternia, but most of it can’t be read.
EL says that being angry made him blind. She solves the enigma her father had told them and chants a difficult spell and slowly a few skull symbols starts to appear on the map!
(The biggest of them is obviously on where Grayskull is)
They’re just starting to analyze the map when the room starts to shake violently  and begin to collapse.
EL implore SK to leave the library, but SK doesn’t want to go and he takes EL staff form her hands.
While the ceiling starts to crumble over them He chants a last spell using both staffs!
The room collapse.
We move outside and we looks at the smoldering ruins. After a few moments we see EL and Skeletor emerge from the ruins, a bit beaten up but still unharmed.
We pull back and we see a blue skinned, white dressed and white haired woman observing the scene from the distance. She’s not very young probably a bit younger than Duncan  and she wear her Warriors Ring on her left hand but I’m not sure how much we want to drive readers attention on this yet.
 On her side there is a big white panther with a silver saddle. She’s talking to the feline. From the dialogue we understand the she caused the ruin to collapse but he didn’t succeed in stopping SK… but she doesn’t dare to confront SK and EL directly and it’s time for the Guardians of Grayskull to move!"

There was really not much else in the plot about her so far. I did the original sketch of her at the same time, to present it to MVCreations.
This is where I introduced, for the very first time, the idea of this mysterious white dressed woman.
She was already in my thoughts since Homecoming. She was nothing more than a plot device back then. At that time, I wanted to merge the original Don Glut minicomic with the Filmation cartoon, so I had He-Man living in a tribe, but secretly being Prince Adam, hidden far from Eternos when he was an infant, to escape from the Horde invasion.
I needed someone that took the kid out of the royal palace and traveled with him to these remote regions of Eternia, where she left him to the care of this tribe. And for some reason, I wanted this person to be a woman. She was not a Gar back then of course, but she was already dressed in white and with white hair.

As an added bonus, here is the pencil version of the beautiful cover Enza Fontana drew with Illumina

After a long wait, I finally decided to make the 2002 comic bible public for all fans to read.

A few words about this bible and its history:
The original document was written by me with revisions by Val Staples and James Eatock in January 2008.
That means it's a document written outside the license, there is nothing official about it and it was never submitted to Mattel for approval. By all means, it's an unofficial collection of informations and ideas that was typed outside any kind of relationship with Mattel.

But although it was written years after the MVC license was expired, it collected mostly ideas and concepts I had developed for the MVC MOTU Comic book. Despite none of those ideas being put on paper or ever submitted to Mattel, almost all the plans for the comic presented in this document are indeed what we wanted to tell on the book at that time, they had all been developed by me (some even before my involvement with the 2002 comic) and it was established that we would have continued the comic with my story, giving me almost full freedom to write it. There was no pitching, no official approval process on MVC part. Just the regular back and forth on what to do next and how between me and Val. This is confirmed by this interview where Val Staples himself states this were indeed the official plans for the comic.
What happens in Vol 3 of the comic is also based on these concepts.

The document was printed and sent to the MOTU brand manager in good faith, to offer an idea of what at-the-time-in-developement new MOTU line (which eventually become MOTU Classics) could have been.
 I know for a fact there is no ground to prevent me from publishing my ideas.

The bible is a very bare bones document, nothing fancy and with images reused from other sources. It was never intended to be an engaging fiction, but just a collection of informations presented under a unifying concept that could have been used to create a spin-off/reboot of the MOTU brand.
It must be also noticed this was specifically written around the 2002 canon. Meaning that it isn't necessary my ultimate take on MOTU, just what we planned and would have done in that continuity.

I hope you enjoy it! To read the bible, click on the link below:

Also, He-Man fan Telkan2 compiled a list of info we leaked over the course of several years. It contains extra tidbits not present in the bible. You can check out his list here

Enjoy the interview about our work on the 2002 MOTU comic by clicking on the images!