1992 Link meets 2022 Link

I posted this on Twitter and it really took off so I figured I might as well catalog it here. This great little illustration comes from the Futabasha Fantasy Novel Series: Legend of Zelda, Count of the Black Shadow 1992, by Akio Higuchi. The cover illustration is accredited to Fujiwara Kamui but I don't know if they did the inside illustrations as well because there is no one specifically credited for them. ISBN4-575-23096-0 It's a 254 page novel with about 14 incredible illustrations. I'll scan the whole thing soon but for now you can find the old illustration scans and info here and the nicer illustration scans are in the LttP art gallery, here. 

Someone wondered if this was real and it was neat to be able to point out it was on my site all the way back in 2004. The reason people haven't seen much of this stuff, even though it's been online for around 17 years, (I somewhat sarcastically, then sincerely, spoke about this in one of my last posts,) is that I had problems where larger sites and forums wouldn't link to my site because supplemental material at the time, at least that wasn't mass consumed in the US like the Valiant Comics, wasn't considered "real Zelda content." People would get chased off if they wanted to post/talk about even just for fun. Which was just so strange to me! Because I can assure you: you can still enjoy the core games without being angry that other stuff was created for the series. It's so much more fun if everyone is just enjoying what inspires them to love the series even more! It honestly helps give it life in the years between games.

One of my friends, linksliltri4ce, also reminded me that A Link to the Past also had the concept of floating islands with temples on them. (Not in game, but in the backstory and manual art.) Which I knew but it never really clicked when it came to how much fun it is to play around with the idea of connecting Breath of the Wild 2 with aLttP. Some of the ruins with pillars on hills in BotW are around the same type of ancient Greek-pillar as Ganon's Tower in LttP, which is in the Sacred Realm too. Anyway, that's all super loose but it's fun thoughts for fan artists and people who like to play with ideas!