Kennesaw State professor uses experience to inspire art students

KENNESAW, Ga. | Apr 21, 2025

Joseph Karg
A graphic artist for decades, Joseph Karg has used his talents for everything from drawing superheroes for Marvel Comics to illustrating tour posters for musical acts. In a slightly different direction, he’s also lent these skills to tell an impactful story of an opioid overdose.

Recently, the Kennesaw State University assistant professor of illustration and sequential art helped an Emory University researcher illustrate the occurrence of opioid-related overdoses in Atlanta’s Little Five Points neighborhood. He uses the project as a lesson for his students in the Geer College of the Arts to demonstrate the power of graphic illustrations and storytelling.

“I talk to my students a lot about the many career paths in this field,” he said. “One of my lessons is specifically about doing illustrations alongside scientists, and I even had a student this semester work with a geologist from Emory to help illustrate local wildlife on the Georgia coastline.”

Long a part of Atlanta’s artistic community, Karg cut his teeth on commissioned tour posters for comedians and bands and has done background painting for many celebrated TV shows.

He worked for a year on an FX’s “Unsupervised,” and after earning his Master of Fine Arts from the Savannah College of Art and Design in 2011, he contributed on the Atlanta-produced hit show “Archer.” But the ebb-and-flow life of a television series wore on him. While illustrating for “Archer” was a dream come true, he realized he wanted more out of the life of an artist.

“When I left that job, I wasn't sure what was going to come next,” Karg said. “But I knew then that it mattered to me that I was working on projects that were more meaningful.”

He spent the next six years teaching at the Art Institute of Atlanta while freelancing as an artist. In 2021, he applied to an opening at Kennesaw State and joined the faculty that fall.

That year, another Atlanta artist referred him to Sarah Febres-Cordero, an Emory assistant professor of nursing whose research focuses on opioid harm reduction. In collaboration with Febres-Cordero, he illustrated a story told by participants in a survey of service-industry employees in Little Five Points about saving the life of a man who overdosed.

“When I first met Sarah, she told me about the project, and how the point of it is to destigmatize drug use and to help humanize these people who struggle with addiction, who are ostracized from their families, and who are considered in a lot of ways less than human by the public,” Karg said. “I thought that was such a great thing to be involved with, and it felt great making that work too.”

“Staying Alive in Little Five” appeared as part of an art exhibit at Emory’s Science Gallery called “Hooked: When Want Becomes Need” and distributed as part of a comic book from the project. Febres-Cordero published a paper about the project in the Journal of Health Promotion Practice, and the duo recently applied for a Guggenheim Fellowship in the hope of expanding “Staying Alive” into a book for wider distribution.

“Seeing the data transformed into art to tell the stories of the participants was an exciting process for me and for the study participants,” Febres-Cordero said. “It was a way to give back to the community that gave us so much by sharing their stories. Joe's talent for creating art, his collaborative spirit, and his technical skills brought our work to life.”

Karg leveraged his experience with Febres-Cordero into a second science-related illustration project with a different Emory professor, a comic that traces the path food takes from farm to table to better illustrate the journey to consumers. In June, he will travel to England to present a paper pertaining to using graphic illustrations to get people interested in historic preservation.

On top of his teaching duties in the School of Art and Design, Karg also supervises undergraduate research projects in comics and sequential art, and in illustration. The teaching aspect has improved his drawing, he said, thanks to the feedback he gets from his students.

“Teaching makes me a significantly stronger illustrator,” he said. “On a semester-to-semester basis, I see significant growth in myself. I would also say that teaching makes you a better teacher. Doing anything, you get better at it.”

– By Dave Shelles

Photos by Matt Yung

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A leader in innovative teaching and learning, Kennesaw State University offers undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral degrees to its more than 47,000 students. Kennesaw State is a member of the University System of Georgia with 11 academic colleges. The university’s vibrant campus culture, diverse population, strong global ties, and entrepreneurial spirit draw students from throughout the country and the world. Kennesaw State is a Carnegie-designated doctoral research institution (R2), placing it among an elite group of only 8 percent of U.S. colleges and universities with an R1 or R2 ɫɫ. For more information, visit kennesaw.edu.