Zelda Manga (Collection Part 1)

As I’m writing this, it’s the summer of 2022. For the past couple of years, I’ve aimed my collecting habit in a particular direction, and it should come as no surprise that it ended up pointing at Zelda.

As a side note, I think I’ve always had the collecting bug. When my mom bought my brother Matt and me a baseball card starter pack, I wanted to get all of them, despite not knowing a whole lot about the MLB. Later in life it turned to X-Men Cards and then Comic Books. At one point around 2002, I was collecting Sobe bottles.  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 

But about three years ago, I decided to invest into some Zelda stuff. When it comes to branded merchandise, I’m not usually one for stuff like mugs, pillows, keychains, stickers, etc. My love for the series is centered around playing the actual games and the joy of completing quests and solving puzzles, and not around wearing a different Zelda shirt each day of the week to advertise my geeky-ness. While having some of that stuff is nice, it’s not the actual content. As another example, the reason I was reading/collecting X-Men comic books is for the art and the story, not for the merch. So a Wolverine telephone wasn’t something that I would purchase myself, but I got one for Christmas. Truth be told, had the money been spent on 10 back-issues that I didn’t have, I probably would have been more excited.

So even though spending money on a Hyrule Crest window decal wasn’t all that enticing, the thing that caught my eye are the Manga books, specifically the ones by Himekawa. And the difference is that this isn’t just some typical Zelda-themed item of something I already owned – like a T-shirt, drinking glass, or Rubik’s Cube – this is actual new content that, admittedly isn’t canon, but related to and based on the original games.



Once I had made that decision, I started out by making some lists from information I found on a few Zelda fansites and let Anne know about my plan. I asked for a few of them for Christmas and Birthdays for the next few years and have slowly been amassing the ones that have been translated into English. At the moment, I have all of them except for the last two volumes of the Twilight Princess series, as well as the 4-book set of hardcover books made by Dark Horse (Hyrule Historia, Art & Artifacts, Encyclopedia, Creating a Champion).

For nearly all of the other non-translated stuff, I have digital scans that I have found in various places on the internet. It should come as no surprise that in Japan there was a lot more material available that didn’t make it to the West. Maybe someday I’ll get actual prints of these. Despite formerly having a grade 6 reading level in Japanese, I don’t know that I want to spend the time meticulously going through one of these books in its original language, so I’m kinda sticking to the English stuff.

There are a few other adventure books and comics that came out in the 90’s, mostly somewhat based on the Animated series. If I had known about them, known where to buy them, and had money to do so, I might have bought them back in the day. But finding out about these kinds of things in a pre-internet era small town would have been rather difficult, plus I don’t know if I would have kept them in good shape all of these years.



Anyhow, I’ve read all of them except for the Twilight Princess ones – I’m waiting for the series to conclude before diving in so that I don’t forget details along the way.



And that got me started onto something else . . . (Part 2)

(Or skip ahead to Part 3)