Hong Kong 97 Magazine -
Mills didn’t shy away from brutality. One infamous sequence showed a British governor’s aide being dragged from his Rolls-Royce and fed into a refuse truck by a mob chanting “Fifty years, no change!” The comic’s most controversial panel depicted a PLA soldier calmly erasing the “Hong Kong” label from a digital map and typing “Shenzhen South” in its place.
The story of Hong Kong 97 begins in late 1996. Writer and artist Pat Mills, known for his dark, satirical work on 2000 AD , was approached by Harrier to create a one-off “graphic novella” that would capture the mood of uncertainty surrounding the colony’s fate. The result was a 64-page, black-and-white comic with a single, unforgettable cover: a junk boat sailing beneath the glowing neon skyline of Victoria Harbour, while a giant, looming shadow of a Chinese soldier with a red star on his helmet stretched across the water. Hong Kong 97 Magazine
As the handover date passed without the predicted digital coup, the comic faded into cult obscurity. Yet over the years, Hong Kong 97 has been rediscovered by scholars as a time capsule of fin-de-siècle anxiety. Its panels have been quoted in essays about postcolonial identity, and its dystopian vision—of systems quietly overwritten, of ghosts in the machine—has proven unexpectedly prescient in the age of surveillance and algorithmic governance. Today, original copies change hands for hundreds of pounds, not for their artistic merit, but for the way they captured a moment when an entire city held its breath, waiting to see what the next fifty years would bring. Mills didn’t shy away from brutality
When Hong Kong 97 hit specialty comic shops in April 1997, the reaction was immediate and fierce. The British press called it “hysterical and racist.” Pro-Beijing groups in Hong Kong demanded it be banned. But copies sold out within days, fetching high prices on the secondary market. Readers were drawn not to its sensationalism but to its underlying question: Could the “one country, two systems” experiment truly survive the weight of history? Writer and artist Pat Mills, known for his
Hong Kong 97 was not a magazine in the traditional sense of a periodical with multiple issues, but rather a landmark comic book series published by the British firm Harrier Comics in the months leading up to the 1997 handover. It is remembered today as a striking piece of pop-culture prophecy, blending cyberpunk aesthetics with raw geopolitical anxiety.
The plot followed a burnt-out British-Chinese detective named Wei Lin, working for the HKPD’s “Ghost Crimes Unit” in the final week of British rule. The story was a hallucinatory noir: Triad bosses were fleeing to Vancouver, corrupt colonial officials were shredding documents, and a new breed of “cyber triad” was uploading ancestral ghosts into the fiber-optic network. The turning point came when Wei discovered that the People’s Liberation Army wasn’t just arriving by land—they were already inside the city’s banking systems, stock exchanges, and water filtration plants, preparing a silent, algorithmic takeover.