This is the first overview of cartoon art in this important cultural nexus of Asia. The eight chapters provide historical and present-day overviews of cartoons and comics in Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam, and sociocultural and political analyses of cartooning in Singapore, Myanmar, and Malaysia. The volume benefits from firsthand accounts gleaned from hundreds of interviews with Southeast Asia's major cartoonists, conducted by the four authors, as well as textual analyses of specific cartoons, on-the-spot observations, and close scrutiny of historical documents.

All genres of printed cartoon art are studied, including political and humour cartoons, newspaper comic strips, comic books, and humour/cartoon periodicals. A sense of trends and problems offers topics for further discussion and comparison with cartoon art of other parts of the globe. Among such topics are national identity, transnational public sphere, globalization, alternative media forms, freedom of expression, consumerism, and corporatism. Southeast Asian cartoon art has a number of features unique to the region, such as having as pioneering cartoonists three countries' founding fathers, comics that gave their name to a national trait, some of the earliest graphic novels worldwide, and a king who hired a cartoonist to illustrate his books.