Khartoon Revealed: The Heart Behind the Magazine
Issue 17 of Khartoon Magazine Newsletter
Hababkoum to the Khartoon Newsletter
I’m Khalid Albaih, founder of Khartoonmag.com
I started Khartoon in 2023, shortly after the war in Sudan began. Like many Sudanese, I suddenly found myself watching my country fall into a full-blown war — and then watching that war slowly become normalized through propaganda from all sides and their backers.
Over the past two weeks, as we prepared to launch this English newsletter, I’ve been spending Ramadan in Sydney as an invited artist at the Biennale of Sydney.
Between alarms ringing from my Qatar phone warning of rockets approaching my hometown, and the constant stream of messages from family WhatsApp groups — relatives still in Sudan or displaced elsewhere — I’ve spent much of my time here trying to explain to people far away that these wars are not just about radical Islam, oil, or the old cliché of “Africans killing each other in a faraway land.”
They are also about what gets cut when war begins:
the truth.
Khartoon is our attempt to document some of that. Through cartoons, comics, and essays by Sudanese artists and writers scattered by this war, we try to tell stories that rarely make it into the news.
This newsletter is where we gather them.
Over time, I hope it becomes a small archive of this moment in Sudan’s history — told by the people living through it.
Thank you for being here.
And thank you for considering supporting this work.
—
Khalid Albaih
Founder & Editor-in-Chief
KHARTOON ?
CARTOON + KHARTOUM + KHALID
Khartoon Magazine, founded in 2023 by Khalid Albaih, is an independent Sudanese magazine dedicated to political cartoons and nonfiction comics.
It operates through a bimonthly cartoonist-in-residence program, where every two months we invite three artists to publish weekly comics and visual stories. Together, they document Sudan’s political realities and personal experiences beyond the headlines.
The name Khartoon is a play on Khartoum and cartoon.
Our logo features Sudan’s national bird, the Secretarybird — a stubborn and resilient creature we’ve adopted as our mascot. The bird was designed by our editor and artist Nader Genie, and for us it represents the persistence of Sudanese artists continuing to draw, even in the middle of war and displacement.
You can download the Khartoon bird here
Khartoon believes in
Independent media
Freedom of expression
Art as resistance
Visual documentation and Archiving by local voices
Do you? Support us to continue!
This week’s cartoons
Eid games and gifts
Do you want a water gun toy or a toy rifle?”
The child: I want a weaponized drone
A Sudanese family, dispersed across multiple countries because of the war in Sudan, exchanging Eid greetings and celebrating together virtually online.
Sudanese Refugees
Forced displacement
Forced return
Artist Spotlight
Shakhbata Podcast
A space for real conversations, heartfelt thoughts, and honest questions , join us and subscribe to our YouTube channel.
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We Document Stories
Khartoon turns lived experiences into art to document what headlines overlook making displacement, hunger, and grief visible, unforgettable, and impossible to ignore.
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