COMICS IN THE PHILIPPINES, SINGAPORE, AND INDONESIA

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.