Bloomfield cartoonist Kevin Calhoun has dreamed up a cast of characters for his cartoon 'Kitchen City.'
Bloomfield High School, Class of ‘77, graduate Kevin Calhoun says he was always drawing something.
“I wanted to be a make-up artist, but after graduating, there wasn’t much out there,” he said last week over coffee at a Broad Street diner.
But he had also been in the school drama club and friends with Harry Berkheiser, the drama teacher. So after graduating, Calhoun, who did not attend college, painted sets for BHS shows including “Grease,” “Arsenic and Old Lace” and “The Little Shop of Horrors.” He then attended HB Studios, in NYC, for make-up and acting, eventually getting some work in commercials as an actor and make-up artist. For Calhoun, stand-up comedy came next.
“I did that for eight years, 1983-91,” he said. “I don’t know why I remember the years, but I got in at a good time. Stand-up was about to boom. I started at Rascals, in West Orange, and from there I worked all over the place. But I always had my hand in art work and worked for a communications company doing ads and caricatures of people. They were 14 by 18 and hand painted. Now I do them on a computer.”
At first, Calhoun resisted using computers to produce art, he thought it was cheating, but soon discovered his mindset was for dinosaurs. He understood he was behind the times. So he went back to school, at night, and learned computer art. He loved it, but did not stop drawing the old-fashioned way.
“I started doing my own cartoons, on the computer, just for myself,” he said. “I sent them out to see if I could find work.”
As a stand-up comic, he was always writing down jokes and gags and had a ton of them. He saw that many were about food. Maybe he should create cartoons about fruits and vegetables, he thought, and the inkling of Kitchen City was born.
The backstory to this realm; Calhoun said that it takes place on an abandoned farm and not all in a kitchen.
“Only two characters were left on the farm: Granny Smith, an apple, and Pinny Rollingwood, a rolling pin,” he explained. “They wanted to know where everybody went and went looking for them. They found fruits and vegetables at farm stands and kitchen utensils at garage sales and asked them to come back to the farm. It was a safe haven.”
Calhoun’s cartoons are single-panel. He had wanted his characters to inhabit Kitchen Town, but a trademark attorney told him that title was taken, but Kitchen City was not.
“It’s a much better title,” Calhoun said.
But something was missing. Enter the character of Tony Rigatoni, a gangland boss.
“He’s a pasta,” Calhoun said. “I needed conflict and loved ‘The Godfather.’”
Other characters moved in, among them Benny Penne, an associate of Don Rigatoni, Mr. Sackit, a brown paper bag and Valdalia, an onion whose son is marked for kidnapping by a sinister group of onions known as the Onion Ring. In 2022, Calhoun Toons LLC was established. There is also merchandise such as tote bags and dish towels and a screenplay for an animated movie is in the works.
“That’s the end-all,” Calhoun said of the movie. “But the cartoons will be for a book. Maybe someday Kitchen City will be a part of pop culture.”.
The cartoons are viewable at: Kevin Calhoun Toons.
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