Radu’s little minions were originally played by actors in suits and completely different in design than the stop-motion creatures David Allen and his team created, which were ultimately what was used. While the story was tight, its mythology absolutely rich for a comic, there were certain major elements of the movie that were changed late in the game-namely the titular subspecies themselves. That was definitely the case with Subspecies. With Full Moon being a direct-to-video studio with a large output, the films were often made both cheaply and quickly, sometimes making it tough for the comics to keep up, or to match the look of the movie itself. Throughout that early ‘90s partnership, Eternity published comics, usually in the form of four-issue miniseries, for Puppet Master, Trancers, Dollman, Demonic Toys and Subspecies. These were not comics based on even cult franchises, these were things many had never heard of, given that in some cases the first issues were hitting shelves ahead of the movies they were meant to tie into. At the time, Full Moon was still in its infancy. This was a huge sign of faith in both the movies and the Full Moon brand itself. In 1990, Band made a deal with the comic publisher Eternity (a division of Malibu, itself a division of Marvel) to turn these straight-to-video franchises into actual comic book series. Yet it wasn’t long after Band made that comparison that it became even more literal than it had probably been at the time. The Full Moon universe often feels like Marvel or DC, albeit on a much smaller budget.

Demonic Toys-or simply one character casually stepping into another franchise. Evil Bong or the Sci-Fi Channel original Puppet Master vs. Many of those series continue to this day, many of them have had crossovers-whether it be title fights like Dollman vs. Yet it proved to be more true than any fan at the time could have imagined. The comparison was made very early on in Full Moon’s run this was barely over a year after the release of Puppet Master, which had been the company’s debut feature. He said that he hoped to create franchises out of many if not all of them, to follow along with the various adventures from movie-to-movie, to even pair up and cross over certain characters.

In the very first Video Zone (the behind-the-scenes featurette attached to most of Full Moon’s films throughout the ‘90s) that played after the end credits rolled on Puppet Master II, Charles Band likened the independent studio’s movies to comic books.

Junji ito short story collection