It sucks to have to deface my amazing photos (ha!) with watermarks and copyright details, but until we have this little plagiarism issue sorted, it is unfortunately a necessary evil (also, as a note to my plagiarists: you can go fuck yourselves, you absolute parasites).

So, here we are with the penultimate issue, of UDON’s adaptation of the Capcom beat ’em up classic, Final Fight. I don’t know why it took so long for Final Fight, given the original arcade game was released in 1989, to be adapted by UDON (who’ve been producing comics based on Capcom’s video games since the early 2000s, primarily Street Fighter), but with 2024 being the game’s 35th anniversary, it seems to have been pretty well timed.

It also doesn’t feel like a comic based on a 35 year old game, but even Final Fight itself continues to age an awful lot more gracefully than many of its contemporaries, with its urban revenge fantasy bearing similar fable-like qualities to Walter Hill’s The Warriors, and his lesser known 1985 movie, Streets of Fire.

In this issue, our team Haggar, Cody, and their ninja friend, Guy, are faced with some of the toughest adversaries yet, as they try and track down Haggar’s kidnapped daughter, Jessica.

Rolento, Poison and Hugo will all be familiar names and faces to Final Fight (and Street Fighter) fans, and they all get their chance at the spotlight in issue three, with writer Matt Moylan, who has already proven to be a fantastic choice for the Street Fighter comics, on fine form here too. He’s very obviously a fan of the source material, and knows it inside out; there’s so many great nods to the events, characters and settings of the comic, even

I also need to point out how good Matthew Weldon’s art is; it’s not the typically showy UDON art style, instead looking much more like a traditionally pencilled comic book, but it’s full of fantastic action scenes and big, bold characters in impressive splash pages.

I don’t have to tell you how campy it is; UDON’s house style, in adapting Capcom’s video games into comics, often retains a high level of silliness, but also does so with tongue firmly in cheek; that’s certainly the case with Final Fight, which is great fun to read.

Here at midlifegamergeek, I’m a huge fan of Final Fight and have been since it first started appearing in arcades in the late 80s. It’s hard to imagine a better creative team putting together an adaptation of the iconic, hugely influential arcade game, and I’ve really enjoyed every issue so far. So now I’m just looking forward to the fourth and final issue; stay tuned to midlifegamergeek.com for the review of issue four, as soon as it’s released!

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