Recent tabloid headlines along the lines of "Condoms To Be Handed Out To 5 Year Olds!" must mean there has been some change in the government's sex education policy for schools. Reading the details a bit more closely, it becomes clear that the government is proposing such radical ideas as teaching 5-year-olds about relationships (I guess some of those children must have been wondering who the two adults were in their house who gave them with food and took them to school).

Cartoons are generally a critic-free zone. They're designed to speak for themselves, and most people can get the point without assistance. All the critic can do, it seems, is analyse the joke to death. But let's not be deterred. Let's take a great cartoon, and see what can be done. This year it's the birth-centenary of the cartoonist Pont, who flourished in Punch in the 1930s. There's a show of his work at the Cartoon Museum in London.

Denmark's leading newspapers have reprinted a caricature of the prophet Mohamed that led to riots in Muslim countries two years ago.

The modern strip cartoon has enormous representational resources. It's a form of image that can do all kinds of things that traditional paintings can't. For example, cartoon characters can speak and think, through speech-balloons and thought-bubbles. And using various graphic marks, cartoons can indicate noises, smells, heat, throbbing pain, the direction of someone's gaze etc.

The other day I was musing on the connection between cartooning and writing, saying that many a fine cartoonist has felt the urge to take up his pen and write words, but that it is very rare for a writer ever to start drawing, whether humorously or otherwise.