Liberal Cartoonist to Temporarily Do Conservative Comic

By: E&P Staff Scott Stantis, in a move echoing last week's election results, is temporarily turning over his conservative "Prickly City" strip to liberal editorial cartoonist Matt Davies.

Davies will do the Dec. 11-16 episodes of the comic "in the spirit of bipartisanship" while Stantis recovers from rotator-cuff surgery.

Stantis creates the 2004-launched "Prickly City" for 75 newspapers via Universal Press Syndicate. He also does editorial cartoons for The Birmingham (Ala.) News and Copley News Service.

Davies is the Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist for The Journal News of White Plains, N.Y., and Tribune Media Services. He and Stantis are both past presidents of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists.

From Dec. 18-23, six other cartoonists will each do one "Prickly City" installment. They include five Universal creators -- Don Asmussen ("Bad Reporter"), Mark Tatulli ("Lio"), Phil Dunlap ("Ink Pen"), Paul Gilligan ("Pooch Cafe"), and Rob Harrell ("Big Top") -- and Greg Cravens, who took over Stantis' previous strip, the United Media-syndicated "The Buckets."

This is the second time in 2006 that Universal creators have helped a cartoonist. When Harrell took several weeks off for cancer treatment, people such as Jim Davis ("Garfield") and Tom Wilson ("Ziggy") did "Big Top" strips.