Southeast Asia has nurtured some well-developed, long-lived, yet widel
y-varied cartooning traditions. In a country such as Brunei, comic art
is scarcely visible, while in the Philippines, it is everywhere - on
billboards, mass transit jeepneys, in TV commercials, and family plann
ing messages. While in Indonesia, cartoonists are fond of tracing comi
cs to centuries-old wayang kulit figures, in Singapore, they are hard
pressed to find indigenous comic art that is more than a few years old
. Three countries of the region, each with a different colonial backgr
ound culture, language, and style of government, are discussed in this
essay. They are the Philippines, with a long history of Spanish and A
merican rule, at least 70 languages of which English is the dominant,
and, for the most part, an American-style government; Singapore, with
British heritage, three major languages, a parliamentary government ov
erwhelmingly dominated by one party and one man for most of its histor
y, and Indonesia, with Dutch colonialism, many languages, and a one-ma
n, authoritarian strand of rule.