A decade before UDON secured the license to create a comic book based on the Street Fighter video game (they continue to perfectly recreate the video game’s tone, style, and characters), now-defunct publisher Malibu Comics I still hold the license to this day. The first “Street Fighter” comic published in the United States was printed.
To be honest, this first issue got off to a pretty weak start, but to be fair to Malibu, back in 1993, there were no official characters, their backstories, and their relationships with each other. was much less clear than it is now.
Still, if that’s the action you want, it will certainly pay off. It’s probably true that Street Fighter fans in 1993 probably weren’t expecting much more than a series of fight scenes, and this issue doesn’t really offer much more than that. Even if you read the synopsis, it feels like there’s more going on within the page, even though it’s immediately obvious.
Bison plans to provoke Sagat into attacking Ryu’s friends in revenge by showing him footage of his defeat at Ryu’s hands (and feet!). Ryu himself is losing his girlfriend (!) Chun-Li, who is focused on tracking down Bison through her new role with Interpol. She believes she is responsible for her father’s death. Ryu’s friend Ken has a new role of his own and seems to be making a name for himself as an actor. However, Bison dispatched two of his powerful minions to fight Ken, with the purpose of provoking Ryu.
The art isn’t great by today’s standards, and is even quite weak in places (and certainly not a patchwork of UDON’s consistently gorgeous style), but the color work is certainly up from 1993 standards. It’s great to see. It’s also surprisingly bloody. Did the makers think they were adapting Mortal Kombat? On a related note, there’s an interesting ad on the back of this issue for the Street Fighter games’ long-time rival, Mortal Kombat, which I’m sure Capcom couldn’t have been excited about.
The real problem here is screenwriter Len Straszewski’s script, which contains terrible dialogue and an uninteresting, very basic story.
Remarkably, in the foreword and afterword by Tom Mason, Strazewski says he hadn’t even played Street Fighter II when he was offered the job, but that before he started writing the script, he He revealed that he had been playing the SNES version of the game for “months”. Compare this to UDON’s longtime Street Fighter fans finally getting to live out their dream of having their favorite game adapted into an anime, and there’s such a difference between the two anime adaptations from the start The reason is obvious.
Capcom was reportedly not happy with Malibu’s handling of the Street Fighter license, and it’s easy to see why after looking at this first issue. Will things get better in issue 2? Well, something big happened that definitely infuriated Capcom even more, so watch this space for our review of issue 2.
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