A genuinely iconic and massively influential arcade beat ’em up, Capcom’s Final Fight was released in 1989 to massive critical and commercial success. Though several sequels and reboots have been released in the years since the original title hit the arcades, none have made anywhere near the impact that the first one did.
The story of Final Fight kicks off in an explosive way, with attract screens showing the new Mayor of Metro City, Mike Haggar, discovering that his daughter has been kidnapped by the Mad Gear gang. Enlisting her boyfriend, Cody, and his friend Guy, to assist in the rescue, Haggar sets out to get Jessica back by any means necessary.
In the case of Final Fight, ‘any means necessary’ translates to taking down the hundreds of members of the Mad Gear gang, with fists, feet and wrestling moves, with Mike Haggar having previously been a professional wrestler. Walking the streets and riding the subway trains of Metro City, gang members are everywhere and Haggar, Cody or Guy can try to take down the bad guys alone, or with a friend.
Of course, if you’re here on Retro Dodo, it’s very unlikely that you need me to tell you what Final Fight is, but what you may not know is that UDON Entertainment have just released the first issue of a comic book mini-series that retells the story of the first game. With four issues planned, and going by the events of the first issue, it seems that each one will be tackling a different section of the game, with chapter one covering the game’s intro and opening stages.
It’s all very well done and is fine-tuned to appeal to Final Fight fans, with beautiful, brilliantly dynamic and kinetic artwork, which does a great job of recounting the (admittedly rather thin) story of the arcade game, albeit with a lot more detail, and with pencils and inks, rather than pixels! In fact, in the image above, you can see just how well writer Matt Moylan and artist Matthew Weldon have replicated the look, feel, and even the cheesy dialogue of the original game, without slavishly adhering to every single visual nuance or word.
In fact, despite that aforementioned silly dialogue and the daft, over-the-top plot, such as it is, which relies on lots and lots of non-stop action, the opening page of this issue, and the first caption we see when we reach Metro City, places it quite firmly in the region of being a literal, close up look at the events of an arcade game, rather than being a story purporting to be set in the ‘real’ world. Framed, in a way, as a fantasy, the campy plot and OTT action doesn’t require a massive suspension of disbelief on the reader’s part.
Each issue is available with numerous variant covers (even web exclusive, slightly NSFW and very expensive variants on offer), including covers directly homaging the Game Over/Continue screens of the game, as you can see above. Other covers homage the posters of famous 80s action movies, such as Streets of Fire, which is said to have been one of the influences on the plot, style and gameplay of Final Fight itself.
UDON are no strangers to bringing Capcom titles out of the digital realm and into comic book form, having produced Street Fighter comics as far back as 2003, and have even published Darkstalkers and Rival Schools titles, alongside bringing Mega Man, Captain Commando, Onimusha and more Capcom-based Manga books to Western audiences. Earlier in 2024, UDON released a one-shot Street Fighter vs Final Fight comic for Free Comic Book Day, which told a generation-spanning tale featuring characters from both long-running Capcom series.
The first issue is out now, and you can pick up the standard, wraparound art cover variant of Final Fight #1 directly from UDON’s online store.
