This third issue of Malibu’s very short lived Street Fighter series is also the last. Despite the fallout from Ken’s scalping and apparent death at the hands of Sagat in issue 2, significant time is given to a fight, between the Street Fighter II video game’s popular sumo wrestler E. Honda and The Ferret, from the pages of Malibu’s The Protectors.

It’s another baffling diversion, and once more probably goes a long way to showing exactly why Malibu were forced to pull the plug on their Street Fighter comics. This issue also contains a fairly lengthy editorial which laments the fact that they lost their licence, as well as ending with text pages of summaries which give a brief overview of where things were headed for each character.

Though the matter of Ken’s death is handled reasonably well, with news spreading fast among the Street Fighter community, it’s not just The Ferret who appears here as an inexplicably added character. No, despite the fact that several members of the cast hadn’t been properly introduced at this stage, writer Len Strazewski saw fit to introduce another entirely new character, Nida, who is seen caring for Ryu’s old master, Sheng Long, who has been poisoned. Bearing a grudge against Ryu, Nida is going to set out to find Ryu, but it’s here that this strange little three issue story ends.

Strazewski doesn’t just toss new characters into the mix seemingly at random; he also used the name of a character who only existed as an April Fool’s Day hoax in a game magazine. Sheng Long’s name came from a mistranslation in the Street Fighter II arcade game, which video game magazine Electronic Gaming Monthly used as the basis for a prank article. In this 1992 article, they detailed how to unlock Sheng Long as a hidden character, and the rumour spread so successfully that it was reprinted in several other magazines, without verification, and widely believed as true. Strazewski clearly took the information as gospel, as he included Sheng Long in the Street Fighter comic without any indication that it was an inside joke.

Anyway, here ends the bizarre Malibu Comics Street Fighter saga. Another hilarious touch in the series is that two out of three of its issues advertised Street Fighter’s then-main rival, Mortal Kombat, on the back cover.

That’s an interesting tidbit, because Malibu went on to much more successfully adapt Mortal Kombat into comic form, with several Mortal Kombat comic series and one-shots being released between 1994 and 1995.

Of course, UDON would later pick up the licence for Street Fighter comics in the early 00s, and have been so successful and highly regarded that they still publish Street Fighter comics to this day.

As for this long forgotten Malibu series? It’s definitely best left in the past as an ill-conceived curio, which holds interest and value only to the most die hard of Street Fighter completists.