Last year, the Ministry of Culture began renovating four floors of an old building on Taipei's Huayin Street, transforming it into the nation's first Taiwan Comic Base. This location will not only become a space for Taiwanese comic artists to create, publish, and exhibit their works, but will also host regular comics-focused networking events.
The first such event, held on Aug. 9 in cooperation with the Ministry of Economic Affairs' Industrial Development Bureau alongside Digital Taipei, brought together hundreds of representatives from the games, animation, IP creation, AR/VR, international digital content distribution, and platform operation industries, generating a raft of business opportunities.
Among those invited were Great Dream Pictures, who shared their experience in making the television version of "The Apocalypse of Darkness Warfare"; Kiwi Studios, with a retrospective on making the live-action film adaptation of "Scrolls of a Northern City"; MoonShine VFX, sharing their work developing motion comics; Pili International Multimedia, who expounded on their experience with IP licensing; and the Cultural Content Financing Professional Cooperation Office, discussing investment and financing in the world of digital content. The Ministry of Culture hopes that such sharing of practical experiences across fields will inspire greater cooperation in the future.
This is not the first cooperation between the two Ministries. Last year, the Ministry of Culture worked with the MOEA's Industrial Development Bureau and the Digital Content Industry Promotion Office to organize a hackathon, and this cooperation continued with this year's 2018 XR Hack Fest, which included a "Taiwanese Original IP Cross-Domain Application Award" to encourage developers to make use of Taiwanese comics and the Ministry of Culture's Taiwan Digital Asset Library.
A total of 30 teams took part this year, 26 of which made use of Ruan Guang-min's "Yong-Jiu Grocery Store," which won the Best Comic for Young Adults and Comic of the Year awards at last year's Golden Comic Awards. Several teams also incorporated distinctive Taiwanese historical architecture into their projects.
The winning entry was new startup Old Driver's "One Day in Yong-Jiu," with the James Weed Studio and GT Fighter teams taking second and third places. Deputy Minister of Culture Ting Hsiao-ching presented the winners with their prizes on Aug. 8, and the winning projects will be on display at the 9th Golden Comic Awards ceremony this October.
With both "Yong-Jiu Grocery Store" and "Scrolls of a Northern City" being adapted this year, Taiwanese comics IP is clearly on the rise. The Ministry of Culture will continue to promote cross-domain cooperation and systems for bringing in investment and financing in an effort to support such IPs being made into games, cartoons, TV shows, and more. And with grants available to support comic artists, it is hoped that they will be able to focus more on creative work, boosting their output and, through the increased visibility from networking events, drive more adaptations based on Taiwan's original cultural content.