From Bust to Boom:

The history of Taiwanese comics includes two previous golden ages and two awful downturns. The first golden age ran from the 1950s to the 1960s. Dominated by martial arts comics, its best-known artists included the likes of Ye Hongjia, Chen Haihong, Hsu Mao-sung, and Liu Hsing-chin. The second golden age spanned the 1980s and 1990s, featuring creators such as Ronald Chu (Zhu De-yong), Tsai Chih-chung, Ao Yu-hsiang, Loïc Hsiao, and Chen Uen.

However, a variety of factors including the changing times, official policy, and the introduction of the Regulations Governing the Publication of Comic Books brought this first golden age to an end. The second golden age ended with the changes in readers’ spending and leisure habits stemming from the rise of the Internet.

The arrival in Taiwan of large quantities of easily licensed and cheap-to-produce Japanese manga made it easy for readers to forget what homegrown Taiwanese comics—manhua—were like. The National Palace Museum began to rectify this situation in 2018 when it hosted an exhibition of the art of comic artist Chen Uen, a first-of-its-kind show that featured original works integrating techniques from oil painting and splashed ink techniques from traditional Chinese painting. The exhibition proved popular, attracting more than 100,000 visitors over its three-month run, surprising attendees with the quality of the art on display, and leaving many wondering why they hadn’t known that Taiwanese comic artists were capable of creating such fine work.

Moonsia’s The Witch and the Bull. (courtesy of Line Webtoon)

Aho Huang, editor-in-chief at Dala Publishing, has done yeoman’s work developing Taiwanese comics during his 35 years in the industry.

Taiwanese learn that comics can be art

A number of factors have affected the public’s view of the comic-book industry. For many years, the art form’s supposedly lowbrow subject matter, diversity of themes, and popularity with children fostered the perception that comics were childish and not really “art.”

But that has changed over time, especially as a generation who grew up reading comic books as children became not just adult consumers with money to spend, but in some cases even scholars or creators. As the aesthetic appreciation of comics increased, people once again began to value comics’ ability to appeal to readers of all ages and all levels of sophistication.

Over the last few years, the government has done a number of things to validate comics: hosting a Chen Uen exhibition at a national-class gallery; former president Tsai Ing-wen repeatedly emphasizing the importance of Taiwanese comics as a content industry; establishing the Taiwan Comic Base on Taipei’s Huayin Street in 2019; and opening the National Taiwan Museum of Comics (NTMC) in Tai­chung in 2023.

These efforts represent the first positive government support for Taiwanese comics in our history, heralding new heights for the industry. According to Vicky Su, chair of the Taiwan Animation and Comic Promoting Association (TACPA), “This is the first time the government has used its power to raise the social status, social perception and cultural value of comics.”

Yang Ting-chen, director of the Department of Humanities and Publications at the Ministry of Culture (MOC), tells us that the just-opened NTMC deliberately designed its bookshop to resemble a book rental shop. Smiling, she observes that many of us have childhood memories of sneaking into book rental shops, which mostly rent out comic books, and that revisiting these memories at a national museum helps us recall them fondly. This huge change in how comics are viewed and valued can’t help but elicit a grin.

The National Palace Museum’s 2018 Chen Uen exhibition was the first of its kind for a Taiwanese comic artist. (photo by Kent Chuang)

A content locomotive

During Vice Premier Cheng Li-chun’s tenure as minister of culture, she suggested using comics as the loco­motive of Taiwan’s storytelling industry. Yang explains that comics have become a key focus for the government’s culture industry promotions because their characters, story­boards and narratives are already established, making them very amenable to adaptation by other media.

What actions has the government taken to support the industry?

Yang says that in 2010 the government founded the Golden Comic Awards, a national awards program that rewards outstanding work in comics. Taiwan Television organizes the awards ceremony and broadcasts it live, giving the Golden Comics a status comparable to that of the Golden Horse, Golden Bell and Golden Melody Awards. The government also established the Comics Fund Project in 2018 under the Forward-Looking Infrastructure Development Program, as a means of drawing cutting-edge ­creators into the industry.

Vicky Su, who served as a consultant on the establishment of the NTMC, says that government policymakers now think about the industry in terms of content and intellectual property: Rather than simply rewarding creators, the government is attending to the needs of publishers and encouraging the cultivation of readers, the building of reading platforms, the development of peripheral merchandise, the international licensing of content, and the adaptation of comics for television and film.

In addition, the government has chosen not to limit grants from the Comics Fund Project to creators, but also to use them to support publishers, sales promotions, and adaptations in other media. Similarly, the Golden Comics Awards reach beyond the Best New Talent and Comic of the Year categories to include awards for Best Editor and Best Cross-media Adaptation, and the MOC encourages international licensing by making its Grants for the Publication of Taiwanese Works in Translation available for comics.

The Golden Comic Awards are the highest honors in the Taiwanese comics world. (courtesy of MOC)

Yang Ting-chen says that the established characters, storyboards and narratives of comics make them readily adaptable to other media.

Creative Comic Collection helped catalyze the third golden age of Taiwanese comics.

A miraculous 2010

But it has taken more than government support to return Taiwanese comics to prosperity.

Aho Huang, editor-in-chief at Dala Publishing, says that 2010 really set the stage for a third golden age of comics.

During the two “dark ages” of 1966‡1989 and 2000‡2010, Japanese comics filled the void left by the dearth of Taiwanese comics. Though comic artists and creators lacked commercial channels through which to express themselves, they never lost their yearning to tell stories.

Comic readers continued to desire stories as well.You can see evidence of that desire in the emergence of a number of Taiwanese doujinshi conventions in the early 2000s. Like the Japanese doujinshi conventions on which they were modeled, these were events where comic fans could gather to celebrate their shared love of comics, not to mention buy and sell fan-made art and comics based on published works.

Doujinshi conventions such as Fancy Frontier (FF) and Comic World Taiwan (CWT), both established in 2002, have enjoyed enduring popularity and continued to set new records for attendance.

The quarterly publication Creative Comic Collection (CCC) was launched in 2009 to promote comic-book, historical, and cultural content from Academia Sinica’s Digital Resources program.

CCC had close ties to Taiwan’s dounjinshi conventions. As CCC’s editor Wen Chun-ya recalls, in those days Taiwan’s commercial imprints were publishing very few Taiwanese comic artists, so CCC’s editorial team had to look for artists at doujinshi conventions. The team’s search proved successful, and CCC ended up collaborating with many popular creators. During CCC’s initial non-­commercial era (Vol. 1‡4), the team returned to conventions such as FF and CWT to give away copies of the magazine. But demand outpaced expectations, with attendees quickly snapping up all 5,000 copies of each volume. Some of those who missed out even offered to pay for “reprints” of the free magazine!

Originally planned as a one-off, CCC’s unexpected popularity prompted Academia Sinica to keep publishing the quarterly, and then in 2012 to transfer it to Gaea Books, which turned it into a commercial magazine.

Vicky Su, who is the CEO of FF as well as chair of TACPA, says that back when there were few jobs on the commercial side of comics, doujinshi conventions offered young creators a way to earn some money while continuing to hone their skills. “The artists who got started during this period developed a sharp nose for the market because if their work was poorly drawn or too self-indulgent, no one would buy it. As a result, they really get that they need to balance their personal ideals and preferences against those of their readers.”

This attribute foreshadowed the advent of Taiwan’s current golden age for comics!

Fans surround popular artists at a doujinshi convention. Such events helped bring attention to early issues of Creative Comic Collection. (courtesy of Fancy Frontier)

Taiwan’s lively doujinshi conventions are an important incubator for artists. (courtesy of Fancy Frontier)