He has many powerful generals under his command, such as Ma Rongcheng, who were all important cogs in his comics empire.
The other is Shangguan Xiaobao, who seems a little introverted compared to the brilliant Wong Yuk-long, but he is a giant in the Hong Kong comics industry in both reality and kung fu themes.
He rose to fame with a comic book of the same name, "Bruce Lee," which commemorated the kung fu superstar Bruce Lee, and subsequently spawned a large number of similar fighting and urban-themed works.
Compared to the joyful revenge and the underworld scenes in "Dragon Tiger Gate", "Bruce Lee" and its derivative series, such as "The Legend of Bruce Lee" and "Wing Chun Sisters", pay more attention to being close to the life of the market and depicting social reality. The boxing and kicking skills also have more "earthiness" and "realism". Its brushstrokes are spicy and vivid, as if using a chisel to carve out the worldly life of Hong Kong society.
The weekly magazine "Sheng Bao" he manages has a unique style and has a solid fan base among the general public, especially adult blue-collar readers.
The two of them competed against each other for nearly twenty years, shining together and jointly supporting the most glorious period of Hong Kong comics from the late 1970s to the mid-1980s, which was later called the "golden age of two heroes".
However, history always has its cruel inertia.
If there had not been Lin Huowang, a troublemaker who traveled through time and space, on the original timeline, after the peak of Wong Yuk-long's hegemony, he would have been hurtling towards the abyss of destruction.
Blindly pursuing capital expansion and ignoring content bottlenecks, he ultimately lost his fortune and life in the stock market gamble.
He was thrown into prison for financial fraud and overturned the empire he had built with his own hands. The Yulang brand collapsed behind bars, leaving only a mess and sighs.
Shangguan Xiaobao, although he managed to avoid jail, relied on his resilience to make steady progress. Later, he even used pseudonyms such as "Kuang" to try to find another way. Eventually, he became a respected "master of comics" and finally received belated recognition and medals from the industry in his twilight years.
However, personal glory could not reverse the tide of the times. Under the multiple impacts of Hong Kong films, new media such as television and video games, and overseas comics, especially pirated Japanese comics, the golden age of Hong Kong comics was gone and gradually faded.
In the end, Shangguan Xiaobao could only be like a lonely gravekeeper, watching the glory of Hong Kong comics fade away in the setting sun and enter its lonely old age.
A crazy gambling game that collapsed in the prime of life, and a silent persistence that faded away in old age, together constitute a tragic epic of Hong Kong's local comics from a hot period to a dead end.
However, at this moment, the wheel of history was severely knocked off its track by Lin Huowang, a strange stone that fell from the sky.
The mushroom cloud that rose in the East Ocean like a nuclear explosion after the publication of 5 million copies of "Dragon Jump" has sent shock waves across the ocean, completely tearing and crushing the future of Wong Yuk-lang and Shangguan Xiaobao that had long been flattened by "fate"!
They saw the crack in front of them that led to the abyss, spreading towards their feet at an alarming speed.
"Screw you! Shangguan Sheng! You really can't stop time (you can't live anymore)!"
In a secret private room deep inside the Tsui Wah Tea House in Tsim Sha Tsui, Wong Yuk-long's eyes were red and bloodshot, like a ferocious beast that had been forced into a corner.
He slapped the round table covered with a snow-white tablecloth with such force that the steamer of shrimp dumplings and steamed buns on the table jingled and scalding tea splashed out of the cup.
But he didn't care about these things at all, but instead threw a beautifully printed magazine hard on the table.
There was a loud "bang" sound!
This is the second Japanese version of "Dragon Jump" that swept Japan!
"Look!
You have to look at it seriously!
Full color! Use the same paper and paint to create a look that's more beautiful than a magazine cover!
Look at his drawing skills! His storyboards! He’s really fast, accurate, and ruthless!
His voice was distorted with extreme anger and fear, and his fingers almost poked through the dynamic double-page image of the Dragon Ball comic on the page.
The vivid training and adventure scenes of the protagonist Sun Wukong are overwhelming. "What they are playing for is passion! Adventure! Fantasy! Beautiful girls!"
Straight into the hearts of young people!
Look at us?"
Wong Yuk-long's fingers helplessly poked heavily on the gray cover of "Yuk-long Comics".
The rough texture of the kraft paper reveals the mottled marks of cheap ink used in the material in the morning light.
Shangguan Xiaobao's eyes also swept over the yellowed inner pages of the "Sheng Bao" weekly magazine he founded - the black and white lines on it outlined the movement of Huo Dongge's fist, which was as stiff as a puppet, and Wang Xiaohu's roar was also frozen in the dull dotted paper.
The second issue of the Japanese version of "Dragon Jump" on the edge of the table has a "Pokémon" cover with a vivid dragon-shaped Pokémon Gyarados and the extremely beautiful and youthful Sailor Moon next to it.
"Have you seen it clearly?"
Wong Yuk-long's voice was a little hoarse, perhaps from being heated up. "The printing press in Japan is from Heidelberg in Germany, and one cover can have over seven colors!
We're still using a second-hand Roland printer from the 1960s, and the cartoons we print out are moldy and still not as pretty as other people's scratch paper!"
He flipped open the inside pages of Dragon Jump, his nails scratching across the afterimage of the high-speed running effects in Sailor Moon, "Look at those speed lines!
Look at those shadow gradients!
The Japanese use 128g coated paper, and our newspaper is thinner than toilet paper!
Shangguan Xiaobao's Adam's apple rolled when he heard this, and the Pu'er tea tasted cold when it slid into his stomach.
He recalled the assembly line he had seen when he visited Kodansha in Tokyo last year: a fully automatic laminating machine coated the cover with crystal-clear varnish, a hydraulic cutter precisely cut the spine, and a robotic arm handled tens of thousands of magazines per hour as easily as breathing.
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