Tony Auth and Daniel Pinkwater Launch Daily Comic Strip

A wooly mammoth named Eugen has sprung from millennial freeze to the comics pages of daily newspapers. He's a congenial, collaborative sort, drawn by Pulitzer Prize winning Philadelphia Inquirer editorial cartoonist Tony Auth and written by National Public Radio commentator Daniel Pinkwater.

Designed as a dramatic, though lighthearted serial rather than a gag-a-day, Norb (the strip is named for the scientist who "caretakes" Eugen) premiered August 6th, and, compared to Auth's usual biting commentary, it's a sheer flight of fancy.

Said Auth: "The rewards [of doing Norb] are of a totally different kind."

Syndicated through King Features, the fanciful social commentary follows the adventures of Norb, of course, a cotton-headed, eccentric genius of a cotton-haired professor; Rat, an androgynous adolescent girl who mistakes Eugen for dog (not that she's not bright, though); and Eugen, a multi-million year old pleistocene wooly mammoth who relishes pizza. All pizza.

Although the trio's adventures often cause them close encounters with bad guys (there's something of a market for mammoths, you see, since they're rather scarce -- especially mammoth's named Eugen, right?), they usually squeak by with a mixture of unsuspected genius and improbable-but-entertaining dumb luck traditional to the menage-a-bumble.

Auth has written and illustrated children's books, but was reluctant to under-take the extra deadline strains of a daily serial. Yet the more he and Pinkwater -- with whom he had collaborated for an Air and Space magazine article -- developed their vision of the strip, the more seduced they became by the joy of it. Auth created Norb as a kind of modern day wizard; Pinkwater transferred Rat (more or less) from one of his many children's books; and the respective duos concentrated on telling and living a story (enter Eugen) instead of daily jokes.

Because Auth lives in Philadelphia, PA, and Pinkwater lives in New York City, the team works via FAX machine and computer modum [sic].

"It's very high tech," Auth explained; "Daniel just gets in the transporter and beams over."

[The strip ended in 1990.]