2D clipping

for a game I am writing I need to use clipping (or another method) to seperate diferent animation frames of a character from a single image. Is there an easy way to do this (or not easy)? any suggestions or pointing me to a tutorial would be nice. Also, I was wondering if there is a more efficient way of drawing 2D images in jogl than using gldrawPixels(). I read somewhere else about texture mapping the image to a quad, would this be better? (sorry if I said that wrong, I’m a complete newb).