On Sept. 25 Signe Wilkinson, a political cartoonist for the Philadelphia Daily News, appeared at Bucks to help launch an exhibit about her craft at the Hicks Art Center Gallery.

Wilkinson talked about how she got into cartooning. Having a B. A. in English, she initially worked as a journalist and eventually began to draw the people she was writing about.

Wilkinson is the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning. “It was a very exciting to win the prize, but I don’t think I was any more or less excited than a man,” Wilkinson said. For her it is a little annoying to be described as a female political cartoonist.

Where does she get her ideas? Wilkinson finds an inspiration from newspapers, listens to the radio and surfs the web.

A typical cartoon takes a few hours to draw. Then she scans it and adds colors on the computer, which takes another hour.

Some of Wilkinson’s cartoons have created plenty of controversy. She often receives calls from people that don’t like her work. She advised students to be really careful about their imagery.

With staff cutbacks hitting the news business, the number of employed cartoonists has dropped dramatically. . When Wilkinson got started there were some 200 working around the country; now there are about 60.

Indeed, Wilkinson sees the future of cartooning in a different way these days. She predicts the increasing popularity of animation and web cartoons.

But, Wilkinson said, “There is always a future for cartooning because people love to laugh and love to make fun of rich people and politicians.”

Interested in seeing Wilkinson`s hard work? Visit Hicks Art Center to see “Political Lines: Commentary and the Art of Editorial Cartooning.” The exhibition runs through Oct. 20. Admission is free and the exhibit is open to the public. It features seven artists (including Wilkinson), and includes four Pulitzer Prize winners. They work in traditional pen and ink, digital software or a combination of both techniques, in both black and white or color.

Cartoons presented in the exhibit were published during the recent presidential election cycle. They entertain, inform, influence, and tease the audience.

“I appreciate that the exhibition is politically balanced. I think it is great,” said Jennifer Gropper, a graphic design major from Lower Makefield.

“I think it is the kind of the show that is important for art students to see, so that they can understand there are a variety of carriers in the arts and political cartooning is one of them,” said Fran Orlando, the director of exhibitions at Bucks.

The guest curator is Michael Kabbash, a graphic design professor at Bucks.

“In today’s world of 140-character-or-less ‘tweets,’ the brevity of a political cartoon is a timely asset,” Kabbash said in his curator’s statement. “Editorial cartoons uniquely summarize and translate complex social and political messages into a form that the general public can understand.”