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Hong Kong culture
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The rise and fall of Hong Kong comics, once a 50-million-copy-a-year industry

Ahead of the inaugural Hong Kong Comic Con this weekend, we look back at a now decimated industry that used to make millionaires of artists

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Various comics from the The King of Fighters 96 series, a popular Hong Kong comic from the 1990s. Photo: Elvis Yeung
Lisa Cam

There was a time when young people in Hong Kong were gripped not by their smartphones, but by weekly comic books.

Throughout the 1980s and 90s, local comic books – known as maanwaa (“free-form drawings”) in Cantonese and manhua in Mandarin – had a huge following, shifting hundreds of thousands of copies each week. Successful comic artists became millionaires and their works were turned into blockbuster films, like The Storm Riders (1998), which was based on Ma Wing-shing’s bestselling Fung Wan series.

According to a 2016 research paper published by Lingnan University titled “Hong Kong comics after the mid-1990s”, industry sales during the 1980s totalled 50 million copies a year. Industry revenues hit US$13 million annually, and individual top-tier comics commanded single-issue circulations of 80,000 to 200,000 copies.

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Elvis Yeung Chi-kong, a former comic story writer who joined the industry in the late 1990s, can still recall the heady days of comics in Hong Kong.

“At its height, Ma Wing-shing’s Chinese Hero series [1980-1995] was said to sell 200,000 copies a week. The titles I worked on sold around 50,000 copies a week.”
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Circulation was impressive. Cheung Chi-chung, a comic book seller based in Choi Hung, describes how it was hard to keep up with the new titles that appeared every day.

“There were over a hundred titles in all; there would be a new one every day. I would need to employ staff to go to different publishers to bring back the stock,” he says.

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