{"id":55885,"date":"2026-05-28T08:02:35","date_gmt":"2026-05-28T00:02:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/?p=55885"},"modified":"2026-05-28T08:02:35","modified_gmt":"2026-05-28T00:02:35","slug":"the-rise-and-fall-of-hong-kong-comics-once-a-50-million-copies-a-year-industry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/?p=55885","title":{"rendered":"The rise and fall of Hong Kong comics, once a 50 million copies a year industry"},"content":{"rendered":"


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There was a time when young people in Hong Kong were gripped not by their smartphones, but by weekly comic books.<\/p>\n

Throughout the 1980s and 90s, local comic books \u2013 known as maanwaa<\/em> (\u201cfree-form drawings\u201d) in Cantonese and manhua<\/em> in Mandarin \u2013 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<\/em><\/span> (1998), which was based on Ma Wing-shing\u2019s bestselling Fung Wan<\/em> series.<\/div>\n

According to a 2016 research paper published by Lingnan University titled \u201cHong Kong comics after the mid-1990s\u201d, 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cAt its height, Ma Wing-shing\u2019s<\/span> Chinese Hero<\/em> series [1980-1995] was said to sell 200,000 copies a week. The titles I worked on sold around 50,000 copies a week.\u201d<\/div>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere 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,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n


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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…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":55886,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[436,4688,5184,3569,4787,5231,787,1569,791],"class_list":["post-55885","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bored-interesting","tag-comics","tag-copies","tag-fall","tag-hong","tag-industry","tag-kong","tag-million","tag-rise","tag-year","wpcat-33-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55885","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=55885"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55885\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/55886"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=55885"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=55885"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=55885"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}