Cartoons

Monthly Gallery Archive Cartoon

Marvel Productions will produce cartoons for movie theaters that will be shown the theaters just before Twentieth Century Fox Inc. releases, the two companies said. The studio said Monday that the cartoons, to be called "Fox Toons," should be ready for Fox summer movies in 1991. The studio's deal with Marvel follows a similar effort by Walt Disney Co., which has packaged Roger Rabbit cartoons with "Honey, I Shrunk the Kids" and "Dick Tracy. " The company did not say how many cartoons Marvel will produce.

Independent television station executives know that the same kids who have to be cajoled into going to bed at a decent hour have no problem waking up at 6 a.m. to watch cartoons. Channel 29 greets the kiddies at 6:30 a.m. with "Fat Albert" and Channel 57 hypnotizes them at the same time with "Inspector Gadget. " Meanwhile, at 7 a.m., Channel 17 airs "Woody Woodpecker. " The stations continue airing cartoons throughout the day - except for a mid-afternoon break for such oldies as "The Munsters" and "Bewitched.

Swarthmore College is always surprising us when it comes to art. This month it's happening at McCabe Library with a 30-item solo exhibit featuring Clay Bennett, the 2002 winner of the Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning. Bennett produces editorial cartoons five days a week for the Christian Science Monitor, and his consistent ability to turn out very good work is shown by his being a finalist three years in a row before winning the Pulitzer. Born in South Carolina in 1958, the son of a much-traveled career Army officer of rock-ribbed Republican leanings, Clay Bennett had attended 10 schools by the time he graduated from high school in Huntsville, Ala. With his cartooning interests already apparent at the University of North Alabama, where he earned his college degree in art and history in 1980, Bennett was briefly a staff artist at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and Fayetteville (N.C.

THE NFL IS TEAMING with Nickelodeon on a series of short cartoons that will air during the season. "Rush Zone: Guardians of the Core" will be televised on Nickelodeon's Nicktoons channel and feature coaches and players from all 32 teams with several of them doing voice-overs as themselves. We can see it now: A roly-poly animated figure dressed entirely in black who looks up from a podium and, in a raspy voice, says, "Times yours. " Actually, we don't know if Andy Reid will be involved, but Giants quarterback Eli Manning and Saints coach Sean Payton already have signed on. The cartoons will be 2 to 5 minutes in length and center around a 10-year-old superhero who has the skills of an NFL player.

ThunderCats Live! at the Philadelphia Civic Center, 34th Street and Civic Center Blvd. An action family arena show, through Sunday. On a scale of 1 to 10, Ian McGuire, 4 1/2, was expecting an 11 for last night's premiere of "ThunderCats Live!" Little Ian was treated to a colorful, dance-filled adaptation of some Saturday morning cartoon adventures. The audience, composed of parents and small children, enjoyed the ThunderCats, a quasi-human, cat-like race. Unfortunately, these characters were on stage for only a short period of the performance.

Garry Trudeau, who rarely shies from controversy, has withdrawn a series of Doonesbury cartoons about the student protests in China because of last weekend's massacre there. The cartoons, he said, were "predicated on a peaceful resolution" of the protests. But "that was a very bad miscalculation . . . and now obviously (the cartoons are) inappropriate," he said. The cartoons, which were to have run next week, have been withdrawn from all newspapers that carry the strip, including The Inquirer, and will be replaced by a series offering an "obtuse look at the Alaskan oil spill," Trudeau said.

For cartoon collectors, MGM/UA has provided a bonanza with its "Golden Age of Looney Tunes" series issued on videodisc over the span of two years. The four volumes (each containing five discs) preserve a total of 280 cartoons - enough, if watched on consecutive Saturday mornings, to inspire a yearlong adolescence. But that's not all, folks. At last the Walt Disney Co. has taken the cue and decided to flaunt its cartoon heritage in videodisc form. Next month, it will release Mickey Mouse: The Black & White Years, presenting 34 cartoons from 1928 to 1935.

SO MANY WORDS have already been written and spoken about the Danish newspaper's decision to publish cartoons that set off a wave of protests - peaceful and violent - and riots by Muslims who reacted to what they felt was an affront to the Prophet Mohammad. We've heard from the historians, diplomats, chief executives, newspaper editors, social scientists and economists. I can't offer the learned analysis they did, but I can humbly present a way we might avoid these painful and costly cultural collisions.

Jules Feiffer, our nation's most versatile and unconventional pundit, launched his career by giving away cartoons to build a following. The Village Voice gladly received and began publishing these handouts regularly in 1956 when the Bronx-born Feiffer was 27. Suddenly the success of that new cartoon series, Feiffer, skyrocketed to mass circulation. His best-known comic strip, Feiffer is now syndicated in more than 100 newspapers worldwide, including The Inquirer. And for three decades now, he has been one of America's leading satirists.

Cartoons by Tony Auth

Today marks the end of my employment as staff editorial cartoonist for The Philadelphia Inquirer. It has been a joyful and happy ride. The Inquirer has been my home since my weeklong job interview in 1971, where my task was to attend editorial board meetings, take positions, argue my point of view, win some arguments, and lose others. In short, for a week I did everything a political cartoonist does at a newspaper - except draw cartoons. I lost most of those arguments, but won the job. John S. Knight had recently purchased the paper and was determined to make it a major metropolitan daily.

MAYOR Nutter: I think it wrong for you to say that we cannot feed the homeless. If it is a crime and my mother can go to jail for not feeding me, who are you to say that we are not allowed to feed the homeless? As a 9-year-old child, I feel that this is a bad decision for you to make as the leader of our great city. Who are you to tell us that we cannot feed those who need help? I will continue to feed anyone who needs help because I was taught that it would be the right thing to do. Brianna Grace Smith Philadelphia GOPeeves Rick Santorum is an undercover agent of the Democratic party covertly embedded with the intention of coercing the Republicans into nominating a candidate who will be defeated by Barack Obama.

PULITZER-PRIZE winning cartoonist Signe Wilkinson is getting a bigger pen. Starting April 8, Signe's lacerating wit will now also appear in a new cartoon in the Sunday Inquirer . Plus, in addition to her daily cartoons for the Daily News , she'll also be appearing in the Inquirer on Tuesdays and Thursdays . . . and on a revamped philly.com page as well. This change is in keeping with Philadelphia Media Network's emphasis on providing quality, original content to as many of our readers and users as possible.

Art Museums & Institutions African American Heritage Museum 661 Jackson Rd., Newtonville, NJ; 609-704-5495. www.aahmsnj.org . Tue.-Fri. 10 am-3 pm. Barnes Foundation 300 North Latchs La., Merion Station; 610-667-0290. www.barnesfoundation.org . $15 (reservations required), free for active duty military families 5/30-9/5. Thu.-Sun. 9:30 am-5 pm. Brandywine River Museum Rte. 1 & Rte. 100, Chadds Ford; 610-388-2700. www.brandywinemuseum.org . Brandywine Heritage Galleries.

Tony Auth, the Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist and a mainstay of the Philadelphia Inquirer's editorial page for four decades, announced today he is resigning effective March 31. The editorial cartoonist joined the Inquirer in 1971, won a Pulitzer for his work in 1976, and has been awarded five Overseas Press Club Awards and the Sigma Delta Chi Award for Distinguished Service in Journalism. He has two published cartoon anthologies under his belt and has illustrated 11 children's books.

Blame Obama for gas prices Fuel prices have doubled under President Obama's rule. The only thing his administration has done to prevent an even steeper price rise is to follow its foolhardy anti-jobs, anti-prosperity, and antigrowth economic policies, which have put a lid on demand. Everything else the administration has done - a feckless Middle East policy, a failed alternative-fuels policy, no policy on replacing oil with abundant natural gas, and a just-say-no policy on drilling for oil domestically where drillers might actually find it, like the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the deep Gulf - has done nothing but ensure that prices will keep moving higher and stay high for years to come.