How ‘Old Master Q’ became Asia’s oldest comic series still in publication, according to artist Joseph Wong

Unlike superheroes in Marvel’s comics or samurais in Japanese manga, Old Master Q puts ordinary people, often ordinary blue-collar workers, in the foreground. In the early days, the characters’ stories were mostly inspired by the observations of Wong’s father, whose depictions were relatable to the masses and offered a good laugh at harsh living conditions in the 1960s and 1970s: street hawkers constantly on the lookout for the police who confiscated their items were depicted as competitors to rickshaw drivers in the speed they run; or the familiar sight of people slurping wonton noodles in a dai pai dong.

In the 1990s, when his father’s health deteriorated, Wong, who was then an architect—and now works as a professor in the same discipline in a Taiwanese university—took over the licensing and publication arrangements of the series. This was perhaps always meant to be: Wong senior had six sons but used the Chinese name of Joseph Wong, the eldest, as his pen name so he could draw for several publications—he apparently had as many as 30 other noms de plume. “My brothers said, ‘Old Master Q is published under your name, so of course you’re the one to take over,’” Wong recalls.

Without a background in visual art, Wong tried to find comic book artists who could create new Old Master Q stories. “I searched for two and a half years. It was hopeless. Nobody could do [what my father did]. Perhaps the candidates thought Old Master Q wasn’t really theirs, so they would just imitate the look of it. But there was no spirit in their work,” he says.

He decided to take on drawing the series himself because he felt it was more important to capture his father’s spirit than mimic his exact style. “As a child, I used to watch my father draw. He worked hard for 12 hours every day. Today, I take inspiration from my memories of him and the sentiment of our family life. When I am drawing, I imagine that my father is guiding my hand; I feel his spirit and memory are always around,” he says. “Even if times have changed and the subjects I draw are no longer the same as his, Old Master Q has never changed its humour and in spirit.”

Under Wong’s pen, Old Master Q reflects a more contemporary, globalised lifestyle and the changing living conditions in Hong Kong: instead of wonton noodles, there are Italian restaurants where the characters share pizzas; propeller planes have been replaced by jets; and more recent events, such as living through the pandemic, are also covered.

The stories now also have more global reach. “The entire world has changed. We’ve all progressed from the Industrial Age to the Commercial Age, and now we’re in the Economic Age,” he says. With globalisation, “the lives we lead now are pretty much the same; people living in New York, Shanghai, Tokyo and other cities can to a certain extent resonate with one another.”

And while his father used to receive a lot of fan letters from Hong Kong and Macau, and occasionally the Philippines, Wong’s fan mail is also more international—partly due to the fact that Old Master Q is now published in Malay, Thai, Indonesian and Hindi as well as Chinese. “The letters are pretty much from everywhere: Japan, Canada, Australia, the US and [Czechia],” he says, adding that most are from Asians living abroad. “Once I received a letter from a place in Switzerland that I wasn’t familiar with. I looked up the return address and it was from a remote area in the mountains. [The sender] had written me this really nice letter saying that he had admired the comics for so many years and finally plucked up the courage to write me a letter to ask for an autograph.” Wong was so touched that he drew an Old Master Q picture especially for him and signed it.

The artist believes that the joy of reading comics is timeless and goes beyond cultural borders. He says that regardless of whether it was comics from a century ago that reflected the ugliness of politics or entertainment-oriented stories today, “when people buy magazines or newspapers, the first thing you want to read is not the headline stories but the comics. Young people read comics, and some of them may forget about it when they grow up. They’ll be busy working and paying the bills, until one day, when they have a moment, they may think about this feeling of joy of reading comics. It’s as if they’ve been missing something in their lives. It’s magical.”

Although there are now more entertainment options such as animated movies and AI-generated graphics that compete with the comics industry, especially print books, Wong believes it is important to embrace modern methods to keep the industry alive.

“I’m completely pro-technology, and I think we can do much more in the future with AI because it can do so much more than a human comic artist, and it’s faster [in generating images],” he says. “But let’s not forget the part about the human touch. Creative arts aren’t just about putting things together—there are memories, feelings and our sixth sense [that come into making artistic decisions] which cannot be replaced by AI, however impressive and surreal the images it generates are. Comic [book art] is one of the most important art forms that proves this.”

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Wong has been approached by NFT and AI companies that want to use Old Master Q for tech art projects, something he’s open to. “I’m not an expert in AI, so I let other people do it. I’d be interested to see what they come up with,” he says.

That doesn’t mean the artist is retiring, however. “Creativity is not a job. It’s not like going to work and going home,” he says. “Sometimes, I still draw until two o’clock in the morning. Once I start drawing, my studio disappears; there’s nothing else, only my drawing and me. Sometimes my wife comes over and we start to dance and draw together while listening to music.

“Creativity in itself is living. If I live to 99, I’ll be drawing until then.”

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