The Zelda Manga Gallery

The Library counts 118 Zelda manga volume lines across five eras — the Famicom-era pioneers of 1986–97, Valiant's American comics, the complete Himekawa library in Japanese and in English, and the 4-koma gag shelf that ran alongside all of it. 79 volumes stand on this shelf with covers verified against the book itself — 46 Japanese editions and 33 American — and 14 of them flip to a verified back cover. The other 39 are fully catalogued and join the shelf one by one as their covers verify; nothing here wears a stand-in cover, and no cover is borrowed, composited, or faked.

Start with Era 1: nowhere else on the English-language web will you find all four volumes of Oath of Riruto (Kobunsha, 1995–97) with their front and back covers in one place. The backs were read off the preservation raw scans, and their barcodes match the ISBN record volume by volume. That is the standard the whole gallery is built to — an image ships when it has been seen, named, and matched to its edition.

The record behind this gallery was built volume by volume — ISBNs reconciled across publisher, library and preservation records, editions separated where the hobby usually lumps them (the English Twilight Princess alone is eleven volumes, a box set, and a Japanese run that does not mirror it) — and it stays open: the 39 volumes not yet on the shelf are still being hunted, and each joins this page the week its cover verifies. The companion shelves of the series' games and guidebooks live in the Zelda Guides Gallery and the wider Zelda section; the manga's stories are read in the Library's Twilight Princess and Himekawa bibliography pages.