“In the beginning, where all was chaos and darkness,
three golden goddesses descended from the heavens…”
Legend of Zelda: The Edge and The Light is a fanfiction based on Nintendo’s Legend of Zelda game series. It was written as a stand-alone story, so you can still enjoy the story without prior knowledge of the Zelda Universe. It centers on the hero, Link, who has returned to the kingdom of Hyrule after a mysterious 10-year absence, to seek out his friend Princess Zelda. Unfortunately, not only has the princess vanished, but the land has been plagued by unrest, and it’s up to him to discover why.
| Read (Completed): | – Chapter 1: The Man In Green – Chapter 2: The Princess of Destiny – Chapter 3: Paradise Lost – Chapter 4: The Golden Power – Chapter 5: The Blood of the Beast – Chapter 6: Past and Present – Chapter 7: Last of the Mighty Ones – Chapter 8: The Edge and the Light – Chapter 9: The Final Battle (1) – Chapter 10: The Final Battle (2) – Chapter 11: Epilogue [END] |
| Rated: | T for Teens. Ages 12+. |
| Audience: | There is some action in the story, but no substantial gore, violence or sexual references. It is a story suitable for younger teenagers and everyone above that age. |
| Read if you like: | Nintendo’s Legend of Zelda series, ofourse! |
The Story
It centers on the Kingdom of Hyrule, a once-prosperous kingdom now plagued by a string of natural disasters, bad harvests and a missing princess. Returning to this kingdom is Link, a young man who mysteriously disappeared 10 years after he was given the title of “The Champion of Hyrule”. His reasons for returning as mysterious, but his first instinct is to seek out the missing Princess Zelda, once a close friend and confidant – and also to uncover the reasons behind Hyrule’s unrest.
If you’re already familiar with the Legend of Zelda series, I must mention that while this story draws mostly from the Ocarina of Time game, it’s not meant to be a continuation of that story. All the existing Zelda games already have manga adaptations, so it makes no sense for me to do a re-telling of one of the games. Instead, I decided to take all the Zelda elements I’m familiar with, and tell me own story using these core elements from the games (while adding my own inventions). This means that this story doesn’t fit anywhere into the controversial Zelda “timeline”, and it also means that Link talks (this last one is what throws most people off).
How This Story Came To Be
This story was originally a random comic I started drawing in 2006, which I then placed online to my DeviantArt account. It garnered a lot of fans, but unfortunately had to be abandoned due to the professional work I was doing. After I finished Small Shen for Harper Collins, I decided to revisit this story, so I can experiment further with the comic-prose format that Small Shen used. As a result, this was written and illustrated from May 2012 to February 2013 (much like a full-time job), and it proved to be rather successful, and it was also completed within the time frame that I had intended. This gave me the confidence to continue working in this form.
This style also lets me solve some of the problems I’ve encountered in working as a professional manga-style comic artist in the past 8 years. One of the biggest problem with comics as a medium is its slow pace, slow speed of production and high expense in creation (unlike Japan, I don’t have any assistants). This makes comics one of the lowest per-dollar-value form of entertainment there is, when you consider that a single volume of manga can be consumed in 10 minutes (and a manga costs $10+ these days). I needed to find a way to double the pacing and the speed of production, while retaining the visual aspect of comics. I also needed to add to, rather than subtract from, the core narrative. Thus mixing prose and comics is what I hit upon – not only does this allow me to draw the characters, the backgrounds and the more emotional aspects of the story, but it also lets me add the inner voices of the character, creating depth in the story in ways that pure comics cannot.
The Book in Print
People once asked for a print copy of this book (though you can read the whole thing online), so I made it available for a few people who really wanted to buy it. Here are some pictures.
