Oriental Heroes - History

History

Oriental Heroes was first published in 1970 under the title Little Rascals (Chinese: 小流氓; Cantonese Yale: Síu Làuh Màhn). It featured stories about young people living in public housing estates in Hong Kong fighting gangsters and criminals. The heroes of the stories exhibited antisocial behaviours, but routinely fought for justice. In the early years of the book's run, the fighting was very graphically illustrated. Various weapons were used, where spilled blood, internal organs, guts, and bones were shown in the injuries that the characters sustained. People criticised the graphic violence depicted in Oriental Heroes and other similar action genre manhua, eventually leading to the enactment of the Indecent Publication Law in 1975, banning explicit violence in manhua.

As the Indecent Publication Law only applied to manhua, Wong Yuk-long established a daily newspaper, called Sàng Bou (simplified Chinese: 生报; traditional Chinese: 生報; pinyin: Shēng Bào), with which to publish Oriental Heroes. In the first month of Sàng Bou's run, the newspaper published actual news together with various manhua titles, including Oriental Heroes on the back cover. After a month, Sàng Bou switched to a manhua-only daily newspaper. Oriental Heroes was published daily in the newspaper, and a full week's stories were collected and published in book form every week. Wong Yuk-long changed the name of the book to its current name of Lùhng Fú Mùhn, with the English name of Oriental Heroes. He also explored less graphic means of depicting violence and altered his drawing technique.

Responding to the success of writer Ma Wing Shing's manhua, Chinese Hero, Wong Yuk-long modified Oriental Heroes again in the mid-1980s. The drawing style began to use a style described by Tim Pilcher and Brad Brooks in their 2005 book The Essential Guide to World Comics as "more realistic," and the stories became more serious and less comical. After 1991, Oriental Heroes started being drawn by other artists instead of Wong Yuk-long himself.