Words and Images: Cartoonist Kevin Kallaugher

   A small exhibit in the San Francisco Cartoon Museum showed a small but spectacular collection of Kevin Kallaugher's political cartoons, known for their stinging wit, exaggerated style, and uncanny knack for being able to bring together the many absurdities of world events and make smart, articulate sense of them. An award-winning cartoonist, he has worked for many news sources in the U.K. and the United States and is the resident cartoonist for the The Economist. His range is wide, from magazine covers, to cartoon strips, to one panel illustrations, and short animated videos. In all of these forms, words and images work together to create an instant visual message that is concise, attention-grabbing and immediately obvious. He doesn't often use use long lines of dialogue, merely labeling caricatures and forms, or using short lines of dialogue in his sequential cartoons. His spare use of words with a short title or label merely serve as a starting off point for the viewer, who is allowed to bring their own associations to that political figure or country.
     In the "What's Wrong With America's Right" cover for The Economist, he uses words to label characters and forms, which are replacing the iconic image of the tea party in Alice in Wonderland with the rise of the Tea Party movement in the United States. The parallels between the tea party in the mad world of Wonderland, and the Tea Party in the chaotic political landscape of America create a very loaded meaning in this illustration, and its no accident that both parties share the same name and spelling. The title words are very subjective in relation to the image, which is also very subjective; however the title takes the message of the image and puts it into precise words so that word and image are both intertwined.
      The lack of words in the rest of the illustration directs more focus to the exaggerated images, to which the viewer will have a stronger response. The unflattering exaggerated features and representations of Sarah Palin, Obama, Fox News, and the Republican Party express perfectly all our negative associations with these figures. Through exaggeration, he is able to articulate our fears and associations. With limited use of words, the viewer is more engaged with the image in that they aren't being dictated to, with more room for individual interpretation.
    Kallaugher's skills in visual communication are nearly unparalleled in how well his marriage of word and image is suited to the act of looking in this attention deficit world: catching our attention immediately and articulately summing up our anxieties and the face of a changing world in cartoons, he is one of the most important voices of today in helping us make sense of our ever more complicated world.