Grotesquerie is Kevin “Kal” Kallaugher’s bread and butter. For fifty years the cartoonist has rendered newsmakers in a fleshy museum of knobbly noses, splayed teeth, dewlaps, wattles, and vast foreheads. He’s produced some 10,000 cartoons for the Baltimore Sun and The Economist—in 1978 he became the first cartoonist hired by the latter—and his work is syndicated in more than 100 newspapers worldwide.
Kevin Kal Kallaugher is the subject of a profile in Harvard Magazine by Dan Kelly.
The profile details KAL’s past and present. But what of the future?
Recently, Kallaugher has stepped away briefly from the news pages to produce a graphic novel aimed at middle-graders. He doesn’t want to reveal too much, but describes the project as having “a heavy environmental theme.” His excitement is clear: “If you imagine that each cartoon is a single frame, a graphic novel is a movie,” he says. “I’d love to be able to transition to that.”