During my elementary school years I always looked forward to the annual book fair in which entire carts of books pitched towards kids my age where assembled in the school library.  Each class was assigned a fifteen-minute block of time to check the carts and buy all kinds of books with our meager allowance money.  One genre that was always available was the ubiquitous "how to draw ______" collection that promised to teach those of us with plenty of time and patience the skills needs to sketch out a quick Bart Simpson, Garfield, or Super Mario.  Those kinds of books are still around and, as Platypus Comix discovered, they aren't any better now than they were then. 

How To Draw The Legend of Zelda advises you not to "grip your pencil like a Lizalfos grasping a sword for battle! Drawing should be fun and relaxing." Easy for you to say, book. These things are typically overwrought with instruction and the result was always frustration. I tried a couple of how-to-draw books as a kid but they were only good for one angry summer afternoon. I can't speak for everyone, but I learn a lot faster when I figure things out myself.

The book boasted at the beginning that you could make your own Zelda comics with enough practice and a copy of the book. It'd be awfully hard, though. These aren't model sheets. They aren't teaching how to draw Link, they're teaching how to draw this exact drawing of Link. What if you want him to turn around? There's no pose for his backside!  And if you wanted him in a fight, this is the only stance he could take. There's so much they're not telling you. For one thing, heads are not shaped like circles. If you draw a circle for a head and then try later to convert it into two downward slopes with a rounded point at the bottom, it'll never look right.

I bought a lot of kiddie-oriented Nintendo books and magazines during my youth, but these instructional art books just never caught on with me.  My mother is the artist in the family.  The best sketch I could ever produce on demand was a drawn-by-memory Ghostbusters 2 logo, and while that might not seem very relevant today, let me assure you that possessing that skill was very important way back in Ms. Staton's second grade classroom.