Why did Link have Hot Pink Hair in A Link to the Past?

The world may never know. ...Unless we look at several years of monthly manga magazine covers from just a 3 years earlier, from early 1986 until late 1988. I don't know though, I've never heard of game developers who also like comics... and certainly not ones about the game they made. It's not like Miyamoto was trying to be a manga artist before he joined Nintendo or anything ...and I really doubt any of them would like one of the best comics ever made for the series. And thus it will forever remain a mystery ♡

Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, in One Pack Comics, by Ran Maru

ゼルダの伝説, わんぱっくコミックス,  乱丸

Find the English translation for the Hyrule Fantasy, the first volume this story starts in, here.

And here are the English translations for Adventure of Link volume 1, volume 2, and volume 3.

There's also some other other magazine art that's kind of fun. The first 2 are a hot pink haired female Link from Shonen Captain (Monthly Magazine) May 18, 1986. 3rd image unknown but it comes from this video. EDIT: I have found, and made, 2400dpi scans of this art of her.

Anyway, just a guess. Maybe we could agree that hot pink is just a great color too. #plink

Edit: There was a giant fanart challenge thanks to @Aeyga_X based on my scans and she was dubbed "Linka" by fans

Edit: Right after I wrote this I found all the pink-haired Link images from this artist. In Shonen Captain and this Wanpakku Guide. The gallery with all 8 starts here. But there is more on it below as well.


Also, I saw this said a lot: "16-bit" is about the processor, it doesn't mean 16 colors. Though, yes! Some of the modes for the SNES topped out at 16 colors per sprite/tile, and LttP is an example of the use of one of those, so I could see how people could get confused. Source 1. Source 2. But, no, it wasn't pink because the bunny was pink and it "needed to be the same color for technical reasons" ...because, even if (?) that were true for some reason, the rabbit's color of pink wasn't even the same as his hair. (Thank you to whomever made this graphic, I couldn't find the source to credit) 

Update: Just to keep all of the Pink Haired Link images in one place, here's a cool feature from a Famitsu issue from 1992

I've had that manga online for ages, on the old main site, (the better scans on archive.org are new,) but so many fans and other sites in the early days would blow off manga (and my scanning work and site) as "not real Zelda content." The ones that would try to post about it or my site would often have their posts deleted. Gatekeeping was an incredibly serious problem in the early days of the community. If you were not one of the popular, male, webmasters you were very often shut down and blocked out. I'm serious, there were full page rants about female run sites and problems with content deemed female-oriented. Like this on what was often said to be the most popular site at the time:

This guy wrote this after he told me to take LGBTQ content off my site and I refused. He then filled his gallery with scans I made (and edited some things into as organic watermarks) and said he scanned them. OmNomBerries, who ran IndieZelda, is still one of my best friends and stuck up for me with this guy at the time. She's a real one. I was friends with the other types of sites that were named and we were usually not allowed to be spoken about or linked to from "big" sites. So that rant needs a bit of self-reflection.

So it's just been overlooked for 35 years when this question would get asked. Which is a huge shame. Wanpakku, Naughty Comics, sometimes translated as One Pack, was a  division of Tokuma Shoten: the publisher Nintendo always officially used back then. And Wanpakku did the Japanese version of Tips and Tactics that Nintendo translated and released officially in the US

Edit 2: Okay, guys, turns out pink haired female Link from 1986 (May 25, 1986 and May 18, 1986) is as official as the Itoh art from Tips and Tactics because she IS in the Japanese version of Tips and Tactics. This kind of changes the way I'm thinking about her, I no longer thing she was just a mistake made by a comic magazine's walkthrough artist like I originally did.

Tips and Tactics was released by Nintendo of America in 1987 and calls itself the "US edition" "Translation of HISSYOU HINTBON Originally published in 1986 by Tokuma Shoten"

Both publishing companies, Wanpakku (the maker of this guide) and Shonen Captain, where she appeared, were owned by the publisher Tokuma Shoten: and Nintendo worked with them a LOT back then.

Here are the 2 manga pages with pink-haired Link and a fairy that were left out, along with some of the Itoh art, of the US edition: 

Edit 3: Slightly different but here's a cute pink-haired Princess Zelda from a Famicom magazine "ファミコン決定版(1986-07-20)"