In Cartoon Vision Dan Bashara examines American animation alongside the modern design boom of the postwar era. Focusing especially on United Productions of America (UPA), a studio whose graphic, abstract style defined the postwar period, Bashara considers animation akin to a laboratory, exploring new models of vision and space alongside theorists and practitioners in other fields. The links—theoretical, historical, and aesthetic—between animators, architects, designers, artists, and filmmakers reveal a specific midcentury modernism that rigorously reimagined the senses. Cartoon Vision invokes the American Bauhaus legacy of László Moholy-Nagy and György Kepes and advocates for animation’s pivotal role in a utopian design project of retraining the public’s vision to better apprehend a rapidly changing modern world.

In Cartoon Vision Dan Bashara examines American animation alongside the modern design boom of the postwar era. Focusing especially on United Productions of America (UPA), a studio whose graphic, abstract style defined the postwar period, Bashara considers animation akin to a laboratory, exploring new models of vision and space alongside theorists and practitioners in other fields. The links—theoretical, historical, and aesthetic—between animators, architects, designers, artists, and filmmakers reveal a specific midcentury modernism that rigorously reimagined the senses. Cartoon Vision invokes the American Bauhaus legacy of László Moholy-Nagy and György Kepes and advocates for animation’s pivotal role in a utopian design project of retraining the public’s vision to better apprehend a rapidly changing modern world.

The imagery of political cartoons provides a unique yet under-studied insight into how Middle Eastern societies think. By combining the indigenous comic tradition of shadow plays with the imported Western print form, and by drawing on both visual and verbal narratives, Middle Eastern political cartoons free the imagination, challenge the intellect, and resist state domination. The essays in this collection focus on the multiple cultural spaces that political cartoons in the Middle East create across societies. Palmira Brummett analyzes the images of women in Ottoman cartoons, while Shiva Balaghi studies issues of nationalism in caricatures from Qajar Iranian newspapers. Ayhan Akman concentrates on the issue of modernity in Turkish cartoons during the 1930-1975 period. Mohamed-Salah Omri takes up the issue of war and cartoons as he comments on the politicization of Tunisian cartoons during the Gulf War.

Daydreams & Nightmares collects the rarest work from Little Nemo In Slumberland creator Winsor McCay's historic career. A fantasist of the first rank, McCay was a key pioneer in the histories of both comics and animation. He had a fascination with dreams that extended beyond his newspaper strip Little Nemo in Slumberland, and it was a fascination as compelling as that of Freud, Jung and Adler's, as proven in the pages of Daydreams & Nightmares. McCay's dream-inspired strips, illustrations and cartoons feature rarebit-induced nightmares, playful "what-ifs," moralistic panoramas, pictorial allegories and other fantastic visions.

Essays on George F. Walker's brash, assertive, perceptive, genuinely perverse, often "wonky," and very, very funny plays.