Hope your summer is sizzlin’ as it has been here in Hoosierland. There’s a lot of animation books hot off the presses and spicy announcements that you should be aware of!

First up, the third Nemo Academy publication has been hitting mailboxes this week, written by Willie Ito and Luca Chiarotti, Willie Cartoonito & My Animated Friends is one part interview and four parts art book. It is chock full of original character design work by Ito, mostly from the Hanna-Barbera iteration of Abbott and Costello, though there are other pieces seen throughout.

The interview featured in this book is mostly the same one featured in The Three Tooners in Florence: Behind the World of Hanna-Barbera, but this publication features a bunch of new photos from not only the Nemoland Legends event in 2019, but a lot of personal photos from throughout Ito’s life and working career.

Selfishly, I would have loved to have read more about Willie’s life in this book. The interview that is here is wonderful – touching on various aspects of Willie’s career working for Disney, Warner Bros., and of course, Hanna-Barbera – but Ito has seen the gambit of the American experience in his life, from growing up in the horrors of Japanese Internment camps during WWII, to his business and artistic successes which brings you and me together today.

Animation book paradisio, Stuart Ng Books, has the exclusive US release for Willie Cartoonito & My Animated Friends, though only a few a copies remain. Additionally, Stu Shostak interviewed all Three Tooners, Willie Ito, Tony Benedict, and Jerry Eisenberg, in July of 2018 on his video and podcast Stu’s Show.

And just like that, Comic Con 2025 is in the books. I have fond memories of attending MomoCon in Atlanta the two times I have attended and there’s nothing worse than knowing that the fun times are over for another year. A couple books to take note of if you don’t quite want to let this year’s festivities go: Escape!: How Animation Broke into the Mainstream in the 1990s by G. Michael Dobbs is an excellent time capsule and history of how fandom, fanzines, and conventions helped push animation to what we know it to be today. Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture by Henry Jenkins puts lines around what fandom can be, how it defines itself, how that changed with the Internet, and how American culture impacts those fandoms. And Schoolgirl Milky Crisis: Adventures in the Anime and Manga Trade by Jonathan Clements highlights how much business, and not business, goes down at conventions around the world.

Lastly, if you haven’t heard the word animation historian, J.B. Kaufman, has announced and confirmed his forthcoming book, Worlds to Conquer: The Art & Making of Walt Disney’s Fantasia, is on deck for a November release.

“The third in the “Making Of” series chronicles the history behind the third Disney animated feature, Fantasia—an audacious, groundbreaking production that challenged existing preconceptions of the arts. This monumental endeavor resulted from the meeting of two geniuses: Walt Disney, who had utterly transformed the art of animation within the space of a decade, and Leopold Stokowski, the celebrity conductor who boldly broke barriers to bring great music to new and diverse audiences. The concept was nothing less than a program of the world’s greatest music, illustrated on the screen by the leading animation studio at the peak of its powers. The resulting film was controversial, eliciting both paeans of praise and howls of outrage from the critics, but has since taken its place as one of the masterworks of the twentieth century. Here, based on years of archival research and interviews with some of the surviving filmmakers, is the full story of this remarkable achievement.”