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Ringo to the rescue

Yellow Submarine and (right) as himself in the The Beatles TV cartoon." align="middle" height="302" width="430">

Animated character ... Ringo (left) as himself in Yellow Submarine and (right) as himself in the The Beatles TV cartoon.

Former Beatles drummer Ringo Starr has joined forces with Stan Lee's POW! Entertainment group to develop a franchise in which Starr will play an animated superhero version of himself.

Starr's character will be an evil-battling, earth-saving, albeit reluctant superhero with a great sense of rhythm.

This will be Starr's third major comic character persona following on from the American Broadcasting Corporation's 1965-67 cartoon series The Beatles and the animated 1968 feature Yellow Submarine.

This time, however, Starr will voice his own character as he did when his cartoon self made a guest appearance on a 1991 episode of The Simpsons.

"He's a great, great guy to work with. He's a real guy, and he's imaginative, and we seem to be on the same wavelength," said Lee, the creator of legendary comic book characters such as Spider-Man, The Incredible Hulk and the X-Men.

The project initially will be launched as a DVD, but the partners plan to explore opportunities in TV, feature films and other multimedia avenues.

"I've been making a CD, so I have lots of ideas," Starr said. "[The action] will be set around a band. They'll be their own characters."

"[This project] wasn't anything I was looking for," said Starr. "But he [Lee] had this idea of a musical superhero - what I like to think of as a reluctant superhero. . . . I'll zoom in to save the world, or a damsel in distress, or a small village. Who knows where he'll go?"

The collaboration came about after POW! chief operating officer Gill Champion and Marjorie Bach, the head of Starr's Rocca Bella group, met during a horse ride and began discussing the possibility of a collaboration.