What is the Metroid manga?
The missing manual: a sixteen-chapter Kodansha manga that wrote Samus’s childhood, and was never officially published in English.
Between 2002 and 2004, Monthly Magazine Z serialised Metroid, written by Kouji Tazawa and drawn by Kenji Ishikawa. It opens on K-2L, follows Samus through her Chozo upbringing, her Federation service, and into the first game’s mission: the backstory the games themselves had left in the margins for sixteen years.
THE BOOK
Magazine Z · 2002 to 2004The editions
Sixteen chapters, collected by Kodansha into two volumes: volume 1 on November 21, 2003, volume 2 on May 21, 2004. The first two chapters were also remade as an official e-manga, in colour, with animation and sound.
What it canonised
Old Bird and Gray Voice, the Afloratite raid, Chozo DNA, Mother Brain as a Chozo creation, Samus’s trauma around Ridley: the manga’s furniture, later absorbed into Fusion’s and Zero Mission’s galleries, Other M’s flashbacks, and the series’ settled lore.
The English situation
There is no official English edition. Anglophone readers know the manga through the fan translation maintained by the Metroid Database community, a strange fate for the series’ official origin story.
The younger sibling
Comic BomBom ran Metroid: Samus & Joey at the same time: three volumes of gentler adventures casting Samus as mentor to a boy named Joey, with a sequel series, Metroid EX. Japan had two Metroid manga at once; the West had neither.
THE OLDER COUSIN
Ink before IshikawaThe Nintendo Power comic
A decade earlier, Nintendo Power serialised a Super Metroid comic drawn by Benimaru Itoh. Several of the manga’s K-2L story beats, and its emotional register, descend from that 1994 adaptation.