Thanks to the diligent research of Melora of History of Hyrule and Zelda collector Ikhana, we have learned that eight volumes of Japanese Zelda manga from the 1980s are set to be re-published digitally as ebooks for the first time. A press release from One Pack Comics has revealed that it will publish its entire manga catalog from the ’80s as ebooks with a few books releasing every month.
The first five volumes from the One Pack Comics catalog are already available on Amazon, but none of them are Zelda-related. New volumes will be released every month, so hopefully, a Zelda volume will be available sooner than later!
But you might be asking yourself, “Why should I care about a Japanese book being re-released in Japanese?” Because you could help us change that!
Help us show English publishers that we want these books!
It feels like a lifetime ago now, but 10 years ago, only a few volumes of the Akira Himekawa manga had been officially released in English. Fans had translated those mangas before their official translations were published, and the hard work and petitions of the community helped pushed publishers to finally make them available outside of Japan.
Likewise, when Hyrule Historia was first announced and the timeline was revealed, we depended on fan translators to make the information available. There was no guarantee that the book would ever be published outside of Japan.
History of Hyrule has hosted scans of these stories for many years, but they have never been translated and have remained more obscure than the Akira Himekawa manga that fans outside Japan are more familiar with reading. The out-of-print stories adapt The Legend of Zelda and Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, but volunteers are needed to translate the books before English-speaking fans can experience them properly.
If this article was about a new Breath of the Wild manga, I think it’s safe to say that an English publisher would likely release the books without hesitation. But this is about 30-year-old books about two NES games, and I do not think there is any such guarantee. We need to show publishers that we want these books too!
You can help show your support by purchasing the Japanese volumes when they are released. With any luck, we will have fan translations ready to help follow along.
If you want to learn more about the eight volumes or are interested in helping translate, History of Hyrule has published an in-depth article about the re-releases and their translation status. If you just want to learn the basics about the different volumes, you can check out this Twitter thread that introduces each volume.
