A Research Office of Picture Document has formally inaugurated in Department of Chinese recently. Prof. Ma Ming-hao will preside over the newly inaugurated office that will center on its research on cartoons and woodcut. Prof. Hung Der-lin took the lead in donating his forty-year’s collection of cartoons to the office.

The school authorities will work out a plan for collecting and exhibiting these editorial cartoons donated by Prof. Hung. Ma said that a cartoon museum would be set up to house them. The proposed museum will become one of the exclusive characteristics of TKU in the future.

The Research Office of Picture Document was the first of its kind to be set up in the university in Taiwan. At present, only Tainan College of Arts has a Research Institute of Picture and Sound. A Research Office of Cartoons was set up in National Chiao Tung University last year. Therefore, “we still have plenty of room to catch up,” Ma said.

TKU will collect cartoons and study them from an academic viewpoint. TKU will also set up a complete data bank and publish books related to cartoons. “We hope the cartoon research office will become a most exclusive characteristic museum in the Asian region in the future,” Ma said. TKU will also work out a mid- and- long term development plan including a cooperation plan with the Institute for Information Industry (III) on online courses and a possible cooperation with enterprises, Ma added.

Prof. Hung has collected cartoons of more than 10 countries in the world. The comic books he has collected are various. They included Superman, Snoopy, Disney cartoons, and Japanese popular cartoons. He has collected more than 70,000 volumes of them, including Taiwan’s first comics published in 1935 and one called “Hui Hui Comics” which had already been out-of-print in Mainland China.

Prof. Ma who proposed the idea of setting up the Research Office of Picture Document and advocated the school authorities to build an exclusive characteristic on the picture document, said that in comparison with the picture document and characters, the picture document has always been neglected in Taiwan. First of all, “we should collect the data and then make arrangement of the collection of Prof. Hung,” he added. He also planned to hold an activity of “Tamkang Cartoons” next semester, inviting several famous cartoonists to demonstrate the arts of cartoon drawing.

The Office will be located on the first floor of the Business Management Building on Tamsui campus. You have to wait for six months or more to see the collection of cartoons because the partition work will not begin until the coming summer. He said that he would solicit school authorities to grant more space for the office as the 16-ping, about 53 square- meter space could not house all the collections.