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How the legacy of beloved Hong Kong comic strip Old Master Q lives on
Alfonso Wong’s beloved comic strip still resonates with generations of Hongkongers nostalgic for a simpler time
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Beloved by children, parents, aunties and grandparents alike, this tall, thin, bespectacled and mustachioed gentleman clad in traditional Chinese attire seems to have emerged straight out of the Qing dynasty to observe, under his furrowed brow, the boomtown Hong Kong has become.
Old Master Q (老夫子) is too honest, too trusting, too kind for the city’s dog-eat-dog ways, but one who always gets up and dusts himself off.
After first appearing in February 1962, the manhua art, or Chinese-language comics, of Alfonso Wong Kar-hei was ubiquitous over the decades that would see him produce more than 18,000 individual comic strips.
Attending a Sotheby’s Hong Kong exhibition of his work in 2014, Wong said: “I firmly believe that drawing comics is not to laugh at other people who fall, but to make my readers laugh by falling, like a clown who makes fun of himself to entertain the audience.”
By most accounts, Wong, who died in 2017, would have turned 100 this year (his birth date being debatable to within a year or two, depending on the source) and fans have recently celebrated the 60th anniversary of Old Master Q’s serialisation in Hong Kong magazines, daily newspapers and comic-book reissues, all reflecting social changes over those turbulent decades.
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