The Street Fighter is a cult favorite. And has the distinction of being the first movie ever to carry an (X) rating due solely to violent content. It's not really my type of movie and Nick's art is the only reason why I would ever watch it.

Nick was originally asked for some gore for the poster. However he never liked depicting actual violence. If you look a lot of his comics stories, you'll see that anything that could be really gory was shown in shadow or "off-camera". The most Nick could muster for this art is the trickle of blood running down the guy's throat and over Sonny Chiba's hand.

The girl is a paste on.

There's an additional image that is probably the only representation of the art before the paste on. Also, the guy being held by the throat has his eyes open. In the final, his eyes are closed.

Nick's covers would frequently use a central figure with the design focused towards or away from the figure. That is also apparent here where the arms, legs or whatever is generally going in the direction of Sonny Chiba. And not only the arms and legs. Thinking in 3 dimensions, some figures are in front or behind Sonny. In 2 dimensions, they actually form a circle around him. In fact, the 2 pasted over figures shown in the additional image actually "break" the design. So all the more reason to replace them with the one figure.

This piece was briefly on CAF a few years ago. It changed hands at least one more time before I acquired it a while back. Finally tried to get a good picture of it. I'm pretty sure Nick used gouache.

Even though I've never seen the movie, I have a weird connection to it, before I even met Nick. I used to work with a guy that had a 3rd degree (I think) blackbelt in karate. He mentioned that he always wanted to see the Street Fighter but couldn't find it. Anyway, one day I was in a video store (remember those?) and saw the Street Fighter on VHS (look it up, kiddies). For whatever reason, I knew my co-worker's birthday was coming up and I got it for him. He said it was really tame by today's (the mid '90s) standards. When I bought the VHS, it did not click with me that box art was by Nick. Nick may have mentioned to me that he worked on the movie. But I didn't realize my previous connection until I saw the original art years after.

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