Ken’s fiancee, Julia, is pregnant, and they’re planning a wedding, but the preening, ultra-narcissisic Spanish fighter Vega still can’t let his defeat by Ken go, and has a plan to exact vengeance upon the martial artist, aided by champion boxer Balrog.

Cammy is in the process of being de-programmed, following on from her kidnap and brainwashing by the evil M. Bison’s Shadaloo organisation; she returns to MI6 in England to atone for her past, and encounters a certain green skinned monster that fans of Street Fighter know and love.

Martial arts movie superstar Fei Long gets into real life trouble with criminals, and teams up with a globetrotting Chun Li after an initial misunderstanding puts them at odds.

Ryu travels the world with his protege, Sakura, who may be an annoyance, but is learning from the master at a rapid rate.

All of those story threads, and more, play out in Street Fighter Classic Volume 2: The New Challengers, and if you think the above sounds like a convoluted soap opera of tangled connections, misunderstandings, shaky alliances and bitter rivalries, you wouldn’t be wrong.

The Street Fighter saga has always thrived on being a larger than life storyline that exists primarily to get characters into a position to take each other on in one to one combat; after all, it’s entirely based on a series of video games in which, yes, characters fight one on one (mostly), with only the loosest of plots to tie it all together.

In other words, it’s big, dumb and incredibly action packed, and it’s gloriously fun to boot. Though it’s hardly going to win any awards for its writing or deep character work, as always UDON Studios have produced a visually stunning soap opera, with gloriously campy storylines that are a great deal of fun to absorb.

In fact, having done this sort of thing for the last few decades (with the issues here having been published 20 years ago), it’s clear that UDON have a flair for this sort of artistically impressive, campy soap opera style; this carries through in all of their many video game adaptations, most recently in Final Fight.

My nostalgia for Capcom arcade games is strong, and I adore seeing the characters I grew up playing as being explored beyond onscreen pixels, and despite being two decades old, this volume of Street Fighter Classic comics has aged really well, especially in terms of its gorgeous art. There’s a ton of material here (with ‘Bonus Round’ additional stories after each issue) too, making this even more of an unmissable collection for Street Fighter fans.

Though it’s hardly high literature, Street Fighter Classic Volume 2: The New Challengers is a perfect love letter to a video game series that shaped so many of us 90s gamers, and I’m looking forward to reading many more of these silly action-movies-on-paper too.

You can buy Street Fighter Classic Volume 2: The New Challengers from Amazon here