Link, the Player

Here's a comic about Link, circa Ocarina of Time, and the various girls thereof. Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time was released back in 1998, after a long, long time in Nintendo's intellectual-property vault. It was truly a turning point in the N64's library, a great 3D action-RPG that rounds out most gamers' top five lists ( [link] ). The story also had some memorable characters, if only a little stereotypical.

Like many other RPGs from Japan, the love interest for the main character is under dispute. The main candidates for Link were Saria, familiar childhood friend; Princess Zelda, tomboyish yet elegant princess; Malon, sweet, hardworking cowgirl; and Princess Ruto, pushy, strong-willed fish-girl. 'Course, Link never gets busy with the ladies in the game, he was too busy kicking ass and taking names, however the seeds for a thousand slashfics were planted with these characters. This comic kinda makes Link as an insensitive jerk, which is sort of expected, given he spent some key formative years trapped in the Sacred Realm, missing out on the Sadies Hawkins dance, etc.

The roughs were sketched up during an unexpected hospital stay; in a valiant effort to stave off boredom, I drew up a storm with handy pad and occasionally cooperative pen. Out of the many random figures, I thought it would be nice to dabble in the sequential artform once more. So, I picked a game and then after an all too brief brainstorming session, I came up with a comic where I could draw all of the Zelda girls. Sketches were scanned in and then re-traced on tablet; colours were blocked and much giggling to be had drawing out Saria's "whimper" expression . I want to mention how difficult it was to find backgrounds for each of the girl's panels; Saria's background was a screencap of Kokiri Forest, but the rest were just hopeful Google image searches of real life pictures which approximates the colour balance I was imagined. Filtering over the backgrounds makes them fit quite nicely, I thought. Zelda's arms-wide-open pose is a bit awkward (heck, I hazard to say very awkward), but I thought Ruto's pose was gangbusters. My sister's opinion, though, was that it sucks; lineweights didn't vary at all, and certain parts of her anatomy were too pointy. The glowy shading on Ruto was kind of a happy accident; I even forget how I got that in the first place, but I kept it because I didn't want to shade it by hand instead. In the end, I did quite a lot of research for this project; I even glossed over the game script to make sure the characters speak like they should. Initially, I had Link without any dialogue (he's practically mute during the game), but I thought that no one would be able to understand that Link was brushing off all the gals, possibly because of cootie related concerns.

Anyways, I'm probably going to do more of these sort of things in the future; I've already done a Mega Man comic ( [link] , it's not that great), as well as FF7, FF8, and Super Mario RPG comics. It's always nice to combine two or more passions in my life like this.