The 12th Taipei International Comics and Animation Festival opened yesterday to long lines of people, some of whom had been lining up since the night before.
A university student surnamed Chang (張), who had traveled with his friends from Taichung for the fair, told reporters that when they arrived at the venue in Taipei about 9pm on Wednesday, people had already began to line up at some of the entrances.
By the time doors opened at 10am yesterday, the lines had stretched from between 100m to 200m outside the 10 entrances of the Taipei World Trade Center venue.
Photo: CNA
The large number of comic fans then rushed through the doors, hoping to snap up some of the lucky bags being handed out at several booths.
Presale tickets for the comics fair had topped 10,000, and the five-day event was expected to generate more than NT$200 million (US$6.38 million) in revenue, Taipei Department of Economic Development Director Chen Chun-an (陳俊安) said at the opening ceremony.
Chinese Animation and Comic Publishers Association secretary-general Kao Shih-chuang (高世樁) said that an estimated 470,000 people are likely to attend the fair over the five-day period.
Photo: CNA
This year, the number of booths has increased to a record 800, 35 percent more than last year, said Su Wei-chuan (蘇偉銓), head of the Taipei-based association that organizes the annual event.
Considering that most countries issue more than five denominations of banknotes, the central bank has decided to redesign all five denominations, the bank said as it prepares for the first major overhaul of the banknotes in more than 24 years. Central bank Governor Yang Chin-lung (楊金龍) is expected to report to the Legislative Yuan today on the bank’s operations and the redesign’s progress. The bank in a report sent to the legislature ahead of today’s meeting said it had commissioned a survey on the public’s preferences. Survey results showed that NT$100 and NT$1,000 banknotes are the most commonly used, while NT$200 and NT$2,000
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) yesterday reported the first case of a new COVID-19 subvariant — BA.3.2 — in a 10-year-old Singaporean girl who had a fever upon arrival in Taiwan and tested positive for the disease. The girl left Taiwan on March 20 and the case did not have a direct impact on the local community, it said. The WHO added the BA.3.2 strain to its list of Variants Under Monitoring in December last year, but this was the first imported case of the COVID-19 variant in Taiwan, CDC Deputy Director-General Lin Ming-cheng (林明誠) said. The girl arrived in Taiwan on
South Korea is planning to revise its controversial electronic arrival card, a step Taiwanese officials said prompted them to hold off on planned retaliatory measures, a South Korean media report said yesterday. A Yonhap News Agency report said that the South Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs is planning to remove the “previous departure place” and “next destination” fields from its e-arrival card system. The plan, reached after interagency consultations, is under review and aims to simplify entry procedures and align the electronic form with the paper version, a South Korean ministry official said. The fields — which appeared only on the electronic form
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) is suspending retaliation measures against South Korea that were set to take effect tomorrow, after Seoul said it is updating its e-arrival system, MOFA said today. The measures were to be a new round of retaliation after Taiwan on March 1 changed South Korea's designation on government-issued alien resident certificates held by South Korean nationals to "South Korea” from the "Republic of Korea," the country’s official name. The move came after months of protests to Seoul over its listing of Taiwan as "China (Taiwan)" in dropdown menus on its new online immigration entry system. MOFA last week
RSS