Shotaro Ishinomori

This weekend sees both the long-awaited debut of Nintendo's latest game console, Nintendo Switch, and the even longer-awaited release of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. In a change from Screen & Page's usual focus on anime, we thought we would use this occasion to look at the media history of perhaps the greatest Zelda game, A Link To The Past!

If you adjust for the fact that I grew up in South Carolina, I wasn't raised in a particularly religious household. I mean, we went to church every now and then, but it wasn't, like, a thing, you know? There was, however, one publication in my household that I read with a faithfulness and devotion that bordered on religious fervor, that I looked to for guidance in times of struggle, and that may have even helped to shape my world view more than any other: Nintendo Power. This week, the first thirteen years of the magazine were uploaded to the freely accessible Internet Archive, and looking back through them, I'm pretty sure they're why I still, to this very day, have a completely irrational hatred of the Sega Genesis. It wasn't just the secret codes or hyped up previews for Daydreamin' Davey that kept me hooked, though. Those were definitely interesting, but there was something else in each issue that kept me wanting to read every single month: The comics.

You may recall this story from last summer about a guy riding around Japan's Chiba Prefecture on a Batpod while wearing a very accurate movie Batman costume. Well, step aside, Dark Knight. Japan's got a new motorcycle-riding hero, and this time, he's a Japanese-born character. Someone with a very accurate Kamen Rider costume has been riding around in Fukuoka Prefecture, specifically in the city of Kitakyushu (and at one point, the surrounding farmland). His mission? To put an end to drunk driving.

Like a lot of kids who grew up in the '90s, I loved Nintendo's monthly magazine Nintendo Power with a passion, and one of my favorite things about it was reading the comic version of The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. I loved that series largely because it made the weird adventure of the video game even weirder. It wasn't until I was an adult that I realized the story was written and drawn by legendary manga creator Shotaro Ishinomori -- you know, the guy who created Kamen Rider and the Super Sentai franchise, among other things -- and realized just why it was so good. Sadly, the story has been out of print for several years, but now it's coming back: Viz Media announced over Twitter today that they will publish a new collection of Ishinomori's Zelda comic, set for release on May 5.

If you've been reading ComicsAlliance for a while, you may already know that for the past few years, I've been working on filling up a sketchbook themed around Jack Kirby, but after three years and over fifty sketches, I thought it was finally time to retire it and move on to something else. That's why this year, I started up a new sketchbook themed around another influential comics creator: Shota

Listen: If it was even remotely socially acceptable, there is a good chance that I would wear a full on Kamen Rider suit, complete with helmet andhenshinbelt, every time I left the house. I mean, the only thing keeping me from accessorizing with one of those sweet scarves is that I have no idea where to find one, or even what to ask for. Can you just roll up into JC Penney and ask for "a Kame

As you might already know from the constant chatter about the Power Rangers and Kamen Rider, we here at ComicsAlliance are pretty big fans of Japanese tokusatsu. Something about those live-action shows where teenagers with attitude transform to kick monsters and summon giant robots just speak to us on a fundamental level. That said, the actual behind-the-scenes origins of the franchises is even mo

If you've been reading ComicsAlliance for a while, then you probably already know that as soon as the calendar switches over to December, I start obsessively watching as many Christmas specials as I possibly can. Not just the big Rankin-Bass specials, either -- I do my best to watch out for the weird ones, like Christmas Comes to Pac-Land and that He-Man and She-Ra Christmas Special where Skeletor

We make a regular practice at ComicsAlliance of spotlighting particular artists or specific bodies of work, but because cartoonists, illustrators and their fans share countless numbers of great images on sites like Flickr, Tumblr, DeviantArt and seemingly infinite art blogs that we’ve created Best Art Ever (This Week), a weekly depository for just some of the pieces of especially compelling artwor

Q: Can you tell us about Kamen Rider Fourze? I understand if it's too painful to discuss. -- @Desgardes A: Kamen Rider Fourze is the single best piece of superhero mass media in the past ten years. And considering that the past ten years also brought us stuff like The Dark Knight, Batman: The Brave and the Bold and that Avengers movie that everybody likes, that's no small thing for me to say. As f