In this issue: ANIME! ANIME! ANIME! How Japan conquered the world with a multipronged assault of giant robots, psychic bikers, and sailor moons! But Japan's greatest animator, Hayao Miyazaki, rejects fantasies of power—and teaches everyone how to appreciate the power of fantasy! Also: Everyone remembers the smash-hit Pixar Image Computer that was in every household throughout the 1980s, right? No? Oh, right. It was a huge failure. But maybe you heard of the ground-breaking animation studio it spawned instead?

From the team behind The Comic Book History of Comics comes the perfect companion piece telling the story of the triumphs and tragedies of the filmmakers and beloved animated characters of the past century and a half—essential for hardcore fans of the medium and noobies alike! It's all here, from Aardman to Zoetrope, Disney to Miyazaki, Hanna-Barbera to Pixar, and everything in-between! Begin in the early 1900s with J. Stuart Blackton and the first American cartoon, Winsor McCay's Gertie the Dinosaur, and Felix the Cat! Find out about Margaret Winkler, the most powerful person in early animation, and Walt Disney, who revolutionizes cartoons with sound and color! Discover how Fleischer Studios teaches us to sing "Boop-boop-a-doop" and eat our spinach, and how Warner Bros' Looney Toons rivaled Disney's Silly Symphonies! Plus, icons of animation including Hanna-Barbera, Huckleberry Hound, The Flintstones, and Ruby-Spears; the Plastic Age of toy-based TV shows including G.I. Joe, Transformers, and He-Man; and the new Golden Age of TV animation launched by The Simpsons! And go abroad to France with Émile Cohl's dynamic doodles in Fantasmagorie; to Japan, where the Imperial Navy debuts the first full-length anime as propaganda, Divine Sea Warriors, and Osamu Tezuka conquers TV as he conquered manga; and to Argentina, which beat out Snow White for the first feature length animated movie by two decades! And finally, Jurassic Park and the computer animation revolution! Post-Little Mermaid Disney, Pixar, and Studio Ghibli conquer the world! If you’ve ever wanted to know more about the history of animation but were afraid to ask, this book is especially for you!

Writing for Animation, Comics, and Games explains the practical aspects of creating scripts for animation, comics, graphic novels, and computer games. It details how you can create scripts that are in the right industry format, and follow the expected rules for you to put your best foot forward to help you break-in to the trade. This book explains approaches to writing for exterior storytelling (animation, games); interior/exterior storytelling (comics and graphic novels), as well as considerations for non-linear computer games in the shortest, pithiest, and most economical way. The author offers insider's advice on how you can present work as professional, how to meet deadlines, how visual writing differs from prose, and the art of collaboration.

School and public libraries often provide programs and activities for children in preschool through the sixth grade, but there is little available to young adults. For them, libraries become a place for work—the place to research an assignment or find a book for a report—but the thought of the library as a place for enjoyment is lost. So how do librarians recapture the interest of teenagers? This just might be the answer. Here you will find theme-based units (such as Cartoon Cavalcade, Log On at the Library, Go in Style, Cruising the Mall, Space Shots, Teens on TV, and 44 others) that are designed for young adults. Each includes a display idea, suggestions for local sponsorship of prizes, a program game to encourage participation, 10 theme-related activities, curriculum tie-in activities, sample questions for use in trivia games or scavenger hunts, ideas for activity sheets, a bibliography of related works, and a list of theme-related films. The units are highly flexible, allowing any public or school library to adapt them to their particular needs.

As Christopher Nolan’s Batman films and releases from the Marvel Cinematic Universe have regularly topped the box office charts, fans and critics alike might assume that the “comic book movie” is a distinctly twenty-first-century form. Yet adaptations of comics have been an integral part of American cinema from its very inception, with comics characters regularly leaping from the page to the screen and cinematic icons spawning comics of their own. Movie Comics is the first book to study the long history of both comics-to-film and film-to-comics adaptations, covering everything from silent films starring Happy Hooligan to sound films and serials featuring Dick Tracy and Superman to comic books starring John Wayne, Gene Autry, Bob Hope, Abbott & Costello, Alan Ladd, and Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. With a special focus on the Classical Hollywood era, Blair Davis investigates the factors that spurred this media convergence, as the film and comics industries joined forces to expand the reach of their various brands. While analyzing this production history, he also tracks the artistic coevolution of films and comics, considering the many formal elements that each medium adopted and adapted from the other. As it explores our abiding desire to experience the same characters and stories in multiple forms, Movie Comics gives readers a new appreciation for the unique qualities of the illustrated page and the cinematic moving image.

At last! The amazing, inspiring story of the comics medium in comics form goes global! In this volume, Fred and Ryan tackle the origins of Japanese manga, French graphic albums, the British Invasion of the American scene, the battle for creators' rights in the US, and how comics have invaded cyberspace and Hollywood! Plus: the Her-Story of Comics continues, and we spotlight other countries' funnybooks across five continents! The Comic Book History of Comics goes wherever comics go--which is everywhere!

In Birth of an Industry, Nicholas Sammond describes how popular early American cartoon characters were derived from blackface minstrelsy. He charts the industrialization of animation in the early twentieth century, its representation in the cartoons themselves, and how important blackface minstrels were to that performance, standing in for the frustrations of animation workers. Cherished cartoon characters, such as Mickey Mouse and Felix the Cat, were conceived and developed using blackface minstrelsy's visual and performative conventions: these characters are not like minstrels; they are minstrels. They play out the social, cultural, political, and racial anxieties and desires that link race to the laboring body, just as live minstrel show performers did. Carefully examining how early animation helped to naturalize virulent racial formations, Sammond explores how cartoons used laughter and sentimentality to make those stereotypes seem not only less cruel, but actually pleasurable. Although the visible links between cartoon characters and the minstrel stage faded long ago, Sammond shows how important those links are to thinking about animation then and now, and about how cartoons continue to help to illuminate the central place of race in American cultural and social life.