30 Years of Street Fighter, 30 Days of Characters; #27

The Wraith, like many of the characters at the start of my list of 30 is on the extreme end of designs. He exists in a group with characters like Blanka and Dhalsim. These fighters are designed to be visually shocking. They are used very sparingly by Capcom otherwise they lose their impact. As the list of Street Fighter universe characters I'm talking about gets smaller expect them to be more normal looking. But I digress... The Wraith as you can guess was never in a numbered Street Fighter game. He exists in the extended universe. He appeared in the game Super Muscle Bomber / Ring of Destruction: Slammasters II (1993). This character, like the others in the series (except for Mike Haggar) was designed by Tetsuo Hara, the artist behind Hokuto No Ken / Fist of the North Star.

As I mentioned previously Mr. Hara is a huge wrestling fan. He knows the wrestlers from different eras, different countries, and different organizations. He created exaggerated versions of real people and in some cases amalgamations of several different performers for the Muscle Bomber lineup. For the Wraith he wanted to make a nightmarish villain. He used Mark Calaway the wrestler known as the Undertaker as the template. The Undertaker in the WWF / WWE had a very strong gimmick, he was a giant of a man, seemingly undead with great strength and purported supernatural powers. The Wraith pushed that concept even further, he was a green-skinned giant (like Frankenstein's monster), moved like a zombie with long red claws. He also had supernatural powers. He could breathe fire and produce snakes from his head! The Wraith was also from India, but his look couldn't be any further from Dhalsim or any other Tiger Jeet Singh archetypes.

The Wraith was a very memorable Street Fighter universe character, not only for his look but also for what he represented in canon. He could have been interpreted as a wrestler that painted himself green and used some sort of showbiz magic to conjure snakes, or this guy was genuinely a death cultist that happened to be a wrestler. Like many of the best Street Fighter characters he was open to your interpretation. That was something that I really loved about the most iconic fighters. It was up to you to fill in the blanks. What do you think about over-the-top characters like Dhalsim, Blanka or even the Wraith, do they make the Street Fighter universe more or less interesting to you? The next character in the series also happens to be a mysterious fighter. I hope to see you back for that. As always if you enjoyed this blog and would like to sponsor me please visit my Patreon page and consider donating each month, even as little as $1 would help make better blogs and even podcasts!