The story of how this museum came to exist is almost as dramatic as any comic strip. Taichung Mayor Lin Chia-lung proposed the idea on September 1, 2017, and the Ministry of Culture quickly embraced it, announcing plans to build within the Taichung Shuinan Economic and Trade Park. Construction of the broader Central Taiwan Cinema Center — of which the museum was to be a part — broke ground in April 2018. Then, in May 2020, disputes over spacing arrangements within the Cinema Center prompted the Ministry to withdraw the museum entirely. Two alternative sites were considered that September: the Empire Sugar Factory Taichung Office and the Xinmin Street Railway Warehouses. A tentative plan moved forward, until a land ownership dispute halted progress again in early 2023. The Japanese-era Taichung Prison compound was chosen as the new home on April 1, 2023. Fittingly, the final site turned out to be the most resonant of all.

The campus the museum now inhabits sprawls across more than two hectares. Its oldest structure, the officials' quarters, dates to 1915. The centerpiece — the Budokan Martial Arts Hall — was built in 1937 to train prison guards in judo and kendo during Japan's colonial administration of Taiwan. After Taiwan's handover to the Republic of China in 1945, the complex became Taichung Prison, and the Budokan served whatever institutional purposes the new era required. Walking through it today, past exhibition panels celebrating the history of Taiwanese and Chinese-language comics, the building's martial geometry — high ceilings, solid columns, strict symmetry — creates an unexpectedly dramatic gallery space. A pond called Mirror Lake sits on the grounds, its surface reflecting the wooden eaves of structures that have outlasted every political order that built them.

Taiwan has a rich comics tradition that spans Japanese-influenced manga, local manhua, and generations of artists who worked under censorship, around it, and eventually free of it. The museum's collections and exhibitions trace this lineage — the postwar years when comics were strictly regulated, the underground circulation of material that bypassed official channels, and the flowering of contemporary Taiwanese graphic storytelling that followed. Children's literature occupies a dedicated wing. Themed exhibitions rotate through the complex's various buildings, each space carrying its own architectural personality. The partial opening in December 2023 marked the beginning of a phased opening; additional galleries and programming continue to expand as the campus comes fully to life.

The museum sits in Taichung's West District, accessible from Wuquan Station on the Taiwan Railway — just a short walk northeast of the platform. The surrounding neighborhood still bears traces of its layered past: colonial street grids, postwar urban additions, and the quiet institutional presence of what was for decades a functioning prison. Standing at the museum's entrance, it is easy to understand why comics found a home here rather than in some purpose-built cultural complex. The stories that comics tell — of ordinary people navigating extraordinary circumstances, of identities under pressure, of imagination as a form of survival — feel entirely at home in buildings that have themselves survived so much change.