Ishinomori's A Link to the Past

The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past by Shotaro Ishinomori is a standalone full colour graphic novel, reissued by Viz Media's Perfect Square imprint on May 5, 2015, in a 196 page edition at 9781421575414. It was originally serialized in Nintendo Power magazine in 1992, drawn by one of the most important artists in manga history, the creator of Cyborg 009 and a founder of the tokusatsu tradition, working directly for an American magazine audience.

It is a DIFFERENT work from Himekawa's A Link to the Past, and this page exists largely to keep them separate. Himekawa's is Viz series volume 9 of the black and white run, 9781421523354, later collected in a Legendary Edition. Ishinomori's is a colour comic of 1992 with its own inventions: a fairy companion named Epheremelda, a Roam the knight, and an ending that belongs to Ishinomori alone. Listings, databases and even careful sellers merge the two constantly; the ISBNs do not.

The 2015 Viz edition rescued a work that had lived for two decades in magazine back issues and one long out of print earlier collection. Its return made the Ishinomori telling a normal book again, available beside the Himekawa run it predates by more than a decade in creation and follows in reissue.

The Japanese record is stated honestly: no Japanese edition was verified from an allowed Japanese source in the census pass. A Japanese ISBN-10 circulates in secondary lists only, and the census left the Japanese ISBN field blank rather than guess from it. This is the one Zelda manga record in the cluster where the Japanese identifier is an open research item, and the page marks it as such.

As an object, the Ishinomori volume is the bridge between American comics and manga on this shelf: Japanese master, American magazine origin, game adaptation, modern reissue. It closes the Zelda bibliography's account of the two Links to the Past that a complete collection holds side by side.