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 ā known as maanwaa (āfree-form drawingsā) in Cantonese and manhua in Mandarin ā 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-shingās bestselling Fung Wan series.
According to a 2016 research paper published by Lingnan University titled āHong Kong comics after the mid-1990sā, 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.
Read Full Article At Source
