Kim Casali

Kim Casali (9 September 1941 – 15 June 1997) was a New Zealand cartoonist who created the syndicated cartoon feature Love Is..., originally as love notes to her future husband, in the late 1960s. In one of the first cases of its kind, Casali gave birth to a child sixteen months after the death of her husband, having been artificially inseminated using his stored frozen sperm. The case, which predated the Warnock Report, gave rise to legal discussions regarding the baby's rights of inheritance, and made front-page news across the world. The birth split public opinion and although Casali received "hundreds of letters applauding her bravery", there were many who disagreed with her actions, including the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano which wrote that it was "against evangelical morality."

Born Marilyn Judith Grove in Auckland, New Zealand, Casali left home aged nineteen to travel around Australia, Europe and the United States. In 1967 she moved to Los Angeles where she met and began a relationship with Roberto Alfredo Vincenzo Casali, an Italian computer engineer, at a ski-club where they were both taking lessons. Casali had been drawing cartoons of humorous incidents on the ski slopes, which Roberto encouraged, and she soon began adding cartoon illustrations to messages which she left for him. The very first drawing was created as a "signature" to a note, and represented Casali herself with freckles, large eyes and long fair hair. She said later of these cartoons: "I began making little drawings to express how I felt... It was a little bit like keeping a diary that described how my feelings had grown." In the September 1981 Cartoonist Profiles magazine she said: "I drew a round blob of a girl who was supposed to be me, the one who was feeling all these fantastic things. Then I added a blob of a boy who was the reason I was feeling these things."

Casali's obituary published in The Times related that after she and Roberto became engaged, Casali took a job as a receptionist for a design company, "and made up little booklets of her winsome cartoons, which she sold for a dollar apiece. Word soon spread and the demand for Love is... escalated. Roberto recognised their commercial potential and showed them to an American journalist." Although other sources differ regarding whether it was Roberto or Casali herself who first showed the cartoons to an acquaintance working for the Los Angeles Times, the newspaper picked them up for publication and published the first of the series on 5 January 1970, under the pen name "Kim". The cartoon's release coincided with the wave of success of the novel Love Story (1970) by Erich Segal, and the subsequent movie of the same name starring Ali MacGraw as a girl dying of an incurable disease and Ryan O'Neal as the student who worshiped her. The film's slogan was: "Love is never having to say you're sorry." Casali altered it into one of her most famous cartoons: "Love is... being able to say you're sorry."

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