Raul Julia’s performance as M. Bison in Street Fighter (1994) is one of those towering, improbably perfect performances in movie history. I don’t say “improbable” because he hadn’t proven himself time and again to be one of the grandest actors alive (name a performance where he wasn’t giving 120% – you can’t do it), but because the movie itself is a tremendous mess, and Julia was dying while they were making it. Polygon did a deep dive into the whole history of Street Fighter years ago, and their article on the making of the movie is the gold standard of Street Fighter (1994) journalism, so I’m not going to recount it any more than I already have. If you haven’t read it, it’s worth clicking away to read, before coming back here and finishing my post.
I like the movie because you don’t have to look closely to see what it was trying to be, and what it sometimes even succeeded in doing. The energy of Bison’s “GAME… OVER!” declaration is a peak point of drama and comedy that I think most adaptations of licensed properties only dream of approaching. The “it was Tuesday” speech reaches far beyond the confines of the movie; it’s a great scene. If it’s improbable that a good movie ever gets made, even under ideal conditions, then these transcendent moments in Street Fighter are legitimately miraculous.
Most of my time with Street Fighter outside of the movie was spent playing the original Street Fighter II on various friends’ Super Nintendo systems in childhood, and I was never very good at it, not even when my reflexes were at their twitchiest. I loved the look of the game, though – the incredible distinctiveness of the settings, and the characters. The mystery of it, too. Who were these people? Why were they fighting one another, to what end? The Street Fighter II animated movie (also, incredibly, released in 1994) does a significantly better job of answering those questions than the live-action movie did, but it never fired my imagination the way the game did.
I had no plans at all to make a Street Fighter toy comic, until Jada Toys released their first wave of figures. Every one of them has struck the same nerve in my brain that the original game did, and I knew I wanted to collect them all, and tell a story with them. Obviously, I’m heavily inspired by the tone and subject matter of the live-action movie. I’m having a great time working on it, and I hope you enjoyed reading this first installment of the story!