The Baltimore Sun has fired its editorial cartoonist KAL – the pen name for Kevin Kallaugher, a two-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize who joined the paper in 1988 – telling him his dismissal was a cost-cutting move.

Kallaugher, whose biting cartoons have been skewering Donald Trump and the MAGA movement, among other targets over a decades-long career, figures the real reason for his dismissal is his politics.

“David Smith just doesn’t like my cartoons,” Kallaugher said, referring to the Trump-aligned Sinclair Broadcast Group executive chairman who purchased The Sun last year and has been moving its coverage and commentary steadily to the right.

“He was probably grinding his teeth every time they would appear,” Kallaugher said in an exclusive interview with The Brew after learning of his firing on Friday.

Kallaugher described a meeting he was asked to attend last December at Sinclair headquarters in Hunt Valley at which Smith discussed his plan to hire a local-topics-only cartoonist.

“He says, ‘The problem is the paper’s got this ultra-liberal cartoonist,’ and then I realized, he didn’t know he was talking to me,” Kallaugher recalled, chuckling.

Kallaugher declined to restrict his weekly cartoon to local matters (“We’re living in the most pivotal time in American history in a century. I’m not gonna sit that out”) and figured, since then, that his days were numbered.

Anyone who has followed his award-winning work for high-profile publications – including his continuing role as The Economist magazine’s cartoonist – would likely agree.

A May 31 cartoon that ran in The Sun, for example, shows huge goose-stepping MAGA soldiers carrying “Bow before Trump” banners as they are about to crush a tiny Harvard University campus.

“Students, please be seated,” a professor says. “In today’s world history class, we will be learning about 1930s Germany.”

Smith himself was caricatured in a couple of KAL cartoons that ran before the broadcast mogul purchased the paper.

One (depicted below) was about the revelation that anchors at nearly 200 Sinclair stations around the country were being made to read identical scripts that bashed “fake news” and repeated other conservative talking points.

Smith is shown jamming a megaphone down Uncle Sam’s throat, then shown pointing to his minions doing the same thing, saying, “I’m going to require your local trusted news anchors to do the shoving for me.”

“It was only a matter of time before” before they showed him the door, Kallaugher told The Brew.

Classically Beautiful Grotesqueries

Sun management has not yet replied to a request from The Brew for comment.
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UPDATE: Responding after publication, Sun publisher and editor-in-chief Trif Alatzas sent the following statement:

“We appreciate KAL’s work on The Sun’s pages during these many years. At this time we have decided to allocate our freelance budget to other areas. We will continue to highlight national and international topics through the work of syndicated editorial cartoonists.”
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Kallaugher said he was informed by an editorial page editor that “the paper is going to go in a different direction” and that “Sunday’s going to be your last day.”

“It seemed very unceremonious to me,” he told The Brew. “Not that I deserve, you know, a trumpet and that sort of stuff, but it didn’t seem right.”

Over his long-running carer (he’s produced some 10,000 cartoons for The Sun and The Economist), Kallaugher received multiple awards.

These include the 2002 and 2018 Berryman Cartoonist Award presented by the National Press Foundation, the 2015 Herblock Prize, finalist for the 2015 and 2020 Pulitzer Prize in Editorial Cartooning, and the 2019 Rex Babin Award for Excellence in U.S. for local cartooning.

He also published three collections of Sun cartoons: Kaltoons (1992), Kal Draws a Crowd (1997), Kal Draws The Line (2000), and two others that include work published by the Sun and others.

“Combining classically beautiful cartoon art and incisive wit to create a striking portfolio addressing the Trump administration, international affairs and local Baltimore politics” is how his work was described when he was recognized as a finalist for the Pulitzer in 2020.

“Grotesquerie” is Kallaugher’s bread and butter, noted a profile in Harvard Magazine: “For nearly 50 years, the cartoonist has rendered newsmakers in a fleshy museum of knobbly noses, splayed teeth, dewlaps, wattles and vast foreheads.”

Kallaugher joined The Sun in 1988, left in 2006 and returned after a six-year hiatus, resuming his distinctive style.

His work proved an irritant to Maryland Gov. William Donald Schaefer, the mercurial former Baltimore mayor, who called him out at multiple opportunities, even once at the annual Christmas tree lighting in Mt. Vernon.

Final Toon

As for Kallaugher’s future plans, he says he’s looking forward to soon celebrating his 50th year at The Economist and has been circulating his work through other platforms.

“I’m really excited about a newsletter I’m going to be promoting, and my Substack and a lot of other avenues,” he said, noting that prints of some of his cartoons are available to purchase on his website and that a large batch of framed work is going to go on sale next year.

For those looking for KAL’s most recent cartoon that is still on The Sun website, they’ll find a depiction of Trump on a reviewing stand, watching armored tanks roll by for the military parade he organized that coincided with his 79th birthday.

“Remind me to borrow these the next time my mob wants to storm the Capitol Building,” he says, leaning over to an aide.

Another more recent cartoon (shown below) was briefly on the Sun website, but does not appear to be available now.