Karl Wimer
Karl is the editorial cartoonist for the Denver Business Journal. His work is also published regularly in other Biz Journals across the country, and has appeared in a number of other magazines, newsletters, websites, and papers including USAToday's best cartoons of the week. His cartoons have won the top award for the Society of Professional Journalists (Colorado) five years in a row, a first prize with the Colorado Press Association, and have also been featured in the Best Editorial Cartoons of the Year four years running. His extensive background and success in business give him a valuable perspective on the topic that has proven very effective for clients in a variety of cartoon-related projects.
Taking an unlikely and varied path to his present position, Karl has always had one foot in the world of cartooning. Much of the foundation comes from his mother, Joyce Wimer, a nationally-recognized artist and teacher. Some of it comes from cranking out cartoons for school newspapers such as the Yale Daily and Kellogg Merger. During the early 90's in Prague, he cartooned for the largest circulation English language newspaper in Central Europe, the Central European Business Weekly.
Karl enjoys carrying his various interests and experiences into his cartooning and art. A history major at Yale, Karl beat himself silly earning a letterman's sweater in football, and collected a few larger honors in lacrosse good for hanging on the office wall to impress his friends. He then spent more than four years in Europe, involved in everything from coaching wee Brits on the finer points of lacrosse and high-fives to earning a graduate degree at the London School of Economics to helping rebuild the Czech economy after the fall of communism as a consultant and venture capitalist. He returned stateside to chase his goal of being an over-educated twenty-something, and found success by earning an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern. During those years, Karl also worked in Chile and Thailand, ostensibly as a marketer.
He continued to build his marketing career while hawking the best za's under one roof for Pizza Hut. Karl was fortunate to manage major, co-branded national promotions with big hitters such as the NCAA, PlayStation, Pepsi, Anheuser-Busch, MLB and Lucas Films. The Star Wars Episode I promo was the "can't-miss, notch-in-the-belt-career-opportunity", until people actually saw the movie - and Jar-Jar Binks. Karl left the restaurant world to join the great dotcom gold rush, burning much midnight oil as VP of Marketing for a handful of start-ups.
Several years ago Karl returned to the world of cartooning and illustration. Karl is regularly commissioned by businesses to develop cartoons for marketing and promotional efforts. He has designed logos for organizations big and small, created artwork for new products, designed and developed websites, and frequently receives commissions for portraits, murals and other artwork. Specific recent projects have included designing puppets for a children's video, a logo for a perfume company, and caricatures for the wall of the Denver Press Club. Take a look at much of this at www.kfwimer.com .
When not pitching his Bull & Bear cartoon strip for national consumption, Karl "moonlights" as a marketer for various companies in and out of Denver.
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