Double Dragon is a forty year old arcade game in which two brothers fight their way through hundreds of street toughs to determine which of them will earn the right to a captive woman’s holes. It was adapted into an animated series in 1993, a Street Fighter clone based on that animated series in 1994, a live-action film that same year, and then a second, unrelated Street Fighter clone based on that movie a year later. Confused? I’ve laid it all out in this helpful chart.
The Double Dragon cartoon is rarely remembered by anyone. The live-action film, to the extent that anyone does think about it, is recalled mainly for the casting of Robert “T-1000” Patrick as the villain, Koga Shuko.
Now, I know what you’re thinking — they hired one of the whitest men imaginable to play an Asian character? No. See, they made up Koga Shuko for the movie. The character’s real name is “Victor Guisman,” so he’s basically Kairo Seijuro with business acumen. Oh, also, the big burly guy Abobo from the games looks like he drank a gallon of horse growth hormone and that’s how he learned he was allergic to it.
But there was another Double Dragon adaptation in the ’90s that I wasn’t aware of until Bluesky user “aceofstars” messaged me about it: the Double Dragon Marvel Comics series, written first by legendary author Dwayne McDuffie and then slightly less legendary editor Tom Brevoort, and writer on The Punisher Back to School Special, Mike Kanterovich. The series ran for six issues in 1991, the same year that Double Dragon III: The Sacred Stones was released for the NES. If you’re not familiar, that was the one that was so terrible that they couldn’t even get the main characters’ names right.
Something about the simplicity of Double Dragon apparently makes it impervious to a straightforward adaptation about two brothers fighting street toughs. (It’s just called Two Brothers.) The cartoon and live-action movie both set their stories in a future world, and the comic does as well. Like, check out this totally rad teen wearing a vest that lets you know just how rad he is as he pilots his hoverboard to relay an important message to Billy and Jimmy, who are practicing TikTok dances instead of improving their ground game.
The comic steps even further away from the Double Dragon games by turning Billy and Jimmy Lee into statue-powered superheroes that look like they were rejected by the Wild C.A.T.S. for not putting enough effort into their costumes. Sorry, let me take that again. They look like the Ken and Ryu of a Spanish Street Fighter clone from 1995 called Handsome Gigolo Combat II: Battle for Wealthy Dowager.
As you can tell from their facial expressions, Billy is the reckless goofball and Jimmy is the no-nonsense stoic. These are the only personality traits they will receive in six issues, other than their shared interest in porking Marian Steele, here upgraded from “girlfriend” to “cybercop,” with the power of having a gun and using it.
You want to know what the nude lady’s deal is. Don’t worry, we’ll get there. She is one of several minions of criminal mastermind “Nightfall,” whose lieutenants have progressively more ridiculous names and abilities. In each issue, the Lee boys fight their way through an army of goons before taking on one of the top brass in a boss battle. So it’s just like the video game, except you aren’t having fun controlling the characters and none of the enemies are from the source material — they’re all Dwayne’s OCs.
And you know what? Good on him for seizing the opportunity. Whomst among us, given the chance, wouldn’t force an artist who would much rather be working on Lobo to draw a skinless cyborg with two big stupid metal arms named “Exoskeleton?”
Then there’s “Legerdemain,” who is a wizard and no second thing. Dwayne slacked off a little with this guy, whose role in the plot is simply to divert Billy and Jimmy’s attention from Nightfall’s true aim of stealing their dragon statue. “Legerdemain” means “sleight of hand,” you see!
Dwayne was running on empty when he came up with “Superluminal” as well, who is just an evil Flash that doesn’t do much of anything. But he got a second wind with Undertaker and Overthrow, who I would describe as a minor, problematic Iron Man villain from the 1970s moonlighting as a dominatrix while she’s waiting on a culturally respectful modern reboot and her collared submissive, respectively.
Undertaker doesn’t have any necromancer powers or anything. She and Overthrow just fight with their weapons an— Billy, no! He’s only going to achieve climax!
Was the phrase “ball-busting” in common use in the mid-90s? It feels like it wasn’t, but what else could this possibly refer to? And if the writer was comparing Billy’s thunderous strike to the act of inflicting physical punishment upon a man’s testicles, how did that make it to print in this children’s comic? That would be like if Wolverine shouted, “Time for a little cock and ball torture… X-Men style!” and then had Colossus throw him at a giant mutant chicken.
That weapon/sex toy is called a “Dragon Lance,” by the way, and I don’t want to tell these guys how to do their business, but that is a fucking staff. It is one of three weapons the Double Dragons can summon in their transformed states, though the only one named after a D&D setting. Here’s the second:
Vibe-chucks? Wha? Between this, the Dragon Lance, and the costumes, it feels like Billy and Jimmy are better equipped to be the color guard for the leatherman contingent of a Pride parade than street-fighting martial artists. Surely their final weapon couldn’t possibly be any gayer, she wrote, obviously setting up the gayest weapon ever introduced in this or any comic.
Dazzle Stars! For when shurikens just aren’t fabulous enough. How did we get here from the premise of two brothers beating half of a city to death with their bare hands and the occasional lead pipe?
Now, you might be asking, why are Billy and Jimmy fighting in all of these images? That’s because out of everything in Double Dragon, Dwayne decided that the feature he most needed to stay true to was the ending of the first game, in which the otherwise co-operative action suddenly turns into a one-on-one fight to determine who has to settle for sloppy seconds.
The Double Dragons bicker constantly throughout the comic, but here they’re tricked into fighting one another by the most hat on a hat villain in the series: Stelth, who I guess might have been called that to avoid confusion with Stealth, a Marvel character so minor and pathetic that I am now determined to bring him back the next time they let me write a comic. I think Dwayne might have been trying to launch a backdoor pilot with Stelth, because she gets more screentime than any other henchman and she also has the powers of like half of the X-Men.
Stelth can disguise herself as anyone she wants, mimicking their appearance and voice flawlessly. She uses this ability to kiss and then sucker punch unsuspecting women.
“Is that why she’s called Stealth?” First of all, again, it’s “Stelth.” And second, no. You fool. She’s called Stelth because she can also turn invisible. And you’d think that would be enough. Invisibility plus shapeshifting is a pretty potent combination, and gives the character a clear theme around altering people’s perceptions. Plus she generates her own censor bars, which is thoughtful of her as a character in a comic book where you can’t show nude breasts or taint. But that’s not all there is to Stelth.
Boom, secret Wolverine! But come on, Dwayne. Everybody knows the sound that retractable claws make is “snikt.” Stop trying to make “shlakt” happen.
With Stelth’s help distracting Billy and Jimmy, Nightfall steals the Dragon Statue, but he fails to capture its power. Instead, it turns into a real, living dragon that begins rampaging throughout the city and murdering all criminals.
Billy and Jimmy, knowing full well that their plan is doomed to failure and deciding that they’ve actually had enough of this shit, leap to their deaths and fruitlessly stab at the dragon like the park goon before them.
When that fails, Marian pilots the Dragon Wing, the future plane the Lee family owns for some reason, and fires its military-grade weaponry at the berserk creature.
Dragon Wing, Dragon’s Breath, Dragon Lance. Come on, guys. You’re not 1960s Batman. You can use other words!
Ok, obviously terrible quip, but more importantly: why do two martial artist superheroes have fucking napalm missiles? What possible application could they have outside of this exact scenario? Maybe the higher-ups at Marvel thought this Double Dragon thing had legs and told Dwayne to write in a vehicle for the toy line. Hey kids, collect them all! Jimmy! Billy! Marian! Stelth! And Stan!
Yes, Stan. It’s Stan, everybody! Stan’s here to help! He shows up to teach the boys that the power was inside of them all along, and that fucking obviously they can’t kill the embodiment of brutal, unrelenting justice with swords or napalm. They have to believe!
Wait. What was that he said there? No. They wouldn’t.
They would. They did! The Marvel Double Dragon comic series made real human man Stan Lee the father of Billy and Jimmy Lee from Nintendo. But not just any Stan Lee — a combat Stan Lee who beats ass.
In a huge lore dump we learn that Stan and his pal Shinichi both trained with this martial arts master who passed down the “Dragon Force” to his student Miranda. Stan and Shinichi were also both in love with her, and she picked Stan, driving Shinichi to seek violent revenge. And I need to be clear, all of these revelations didn’t come out on Dwayne’s watch. Who knows what his plans for the last two issues of the comic were? I can tell you what Mike and Tom’s were, though:
Tentacles! Tentacles fondling the body of a woman who looks to be pregnant with twelve hippos! They fucking drew the anime porno face in the third panel and it wasn’t even invented yet, probably! And there’s more!
This is hitting like a dozen different categories on rule34: tentacles, pregnant, oral, swimsuit, dragon_force, old_man, you get the picture. Long story short, Stan kills Shinichi, but he is resurrected by the power of hentai and becomes Nightfall, the embodiment of evil who looks like a Todd McFarlane toilet mistake.
Billy and Jimmy ineffectually beat on Nightfall for a while, then they remember the lesson Stan just taught them about spirit or something and smash the orb containing their mother’s soul, freeing her to possess Marian.
With their powers combined, the Lee family fires a containment beam at Shinichi and locks him into the Dragon Statue forever. Billy and Jimmy celebrate by immediately fighting over a woman who has barely returned to reality after being sent on the lightless walk by the eternal soul of their mother.
We all have a good laugh about how two guys wanting to bone the same woman almost destroyed the world the last time it happened, and we’re out with a quote from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow because comics can have napalm missiles and robot arms but that doesn’t mean that they can’t also be intellectual literature for wise 13-year-olds.
Only the final issue of Double Dragon had a letters section, and several of the letters are about how much the writers hate video games.
They printed their full addresses, which is kind of crazy to me, but I guess that’s the sort of thing you could do in the ’90s.
Don’t worry, though; I’m not doxxing them by reproducing this information — both of the men who wrote in to their favorite video game-based comic to say how much they hate “video games and equipment” are long-since deceased.
Yikes! Billy, Jimmy, could you lighten things up for us a little?
Shit. Fuck.
Uh… Billy and Jimmy died, and Marian married Stelth after she apologized for hitting her in the face and stuffing her in a car trunk that one time. It wasn’t anything personal, just business. They went on to fight crime as an ex-cop and an invisible Mystique Wolverine. Marvel, please greenlight my new original series Double Dragonne (girl Double Dragon) immediately or I will take this million dollar idea to Wattpad.
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