Zowie! A Philanthropist Is Memorialized in a Comic Book

Cereal inventor. Philanthropist. Superhero? Will Keith Kellogg may not have thwarted evil villains with

amazing superpowers, but he does have something in common with Spider-Man, Wonder Woman, and the rest: His good deeds have been chronicled in a comic book.

To celebrate its 75th anniversary, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation commissioned Reuben Negron, a 26-year-old New York artist, to write and draw an eight-page comic that would tell the story of its founder’s accomplishments. The foundation published the illustrated biography and 11 other stories last month in a comic book titled Everyday People Can Lead Extraordinary Lives.

Mr. Negron received $2,500 from the Worldstudio Foundation — a Kellogg grant recipient that oversaw the project — to illustrate two stories for the publication, but he is prouder of “The Life and Times of W.K. Kellogg.” The comic follows the philanthropist from his humble start as a broom salesman to his financial success as the inventor of cornflakes.

It shows how Mr. Kellogg became more philanthropic after he watched the challenges his grandson endured after he fell from a second-story window and became disabled. The story concludes with Mr. Kellogg establishing the foundation that bears his name, which today is one of the largest grant makers in the world.

When Mr. Negron was first approached about the project, however, he didn’t think that Mr. Kellogg’s life would be so, well, extraordinary.

“I was expecting it to be a lot more dry,” he says before a day of work at the Davis Street Studio, in Queens, where Mr. Negron creates most of his artwork. As the New York subway’s 7 train squeals outside on an elevated track — from which passengers can view the graffiti that completely covers the studio’s outer walls and roof — Mr. Negron explains how his interest in Mr. Kellogg deepened as he produced the comic book.

To start, the foundation gave him a one-page outline of Mr Kellogg’s life, which was not nearly enough to capture his essence, Mr. Negron says.

To broaden the sketch of the man, Mr. Negron collected information from the Internet and other resources, such as the The Road to Wellville, a 1994 film comedy about the Michigan health spa and clinic run by Mr. Kellogg’s brother, John Harvey.

The research turned Mr. Negron into an unlikely expert on the life of the philanthropist, including its more obscure details. (“He had his name legally changed to Will, but he was born Willie,” he says.)

Not all of these details, however, appear in the comic. For example, Mr. Negron wanted to explain the falling-out between the philanthropist and his brother over the use of the Kellogg name for the cereal business. But he scrapped the idea because the foundation might object.

In addition, space limitations forced him to leave out other aspects of Mr. Kellogg’s life, such as his two beloved German shepherds. “I had to cover 90 years in eight pages,” Mr. Negron says.

At times, the artist speaks as if he knew the philanthropist personally, and empathizes with the difficulties he faced, such as when Mr. Kellogg lost his sight to glaucoma.

“He spent the last 10 years of his life in complete darkness,” Mr. Negron says about Mr. Kellogg, who died in 1951 at the age of 91.

The biggest challenge with the project was finding a way to trace Mr. Kellogg’s life without turning the comic into a “grocery list” of events. To solve that problem and provide a “human connection,” Mr. Negron frames the biography as a bedtime story told by a white-haired man to his grandson. While told in a fashion easy enough for children to understand, it is a mature work, even including a quote from The Tempest.

What’s more, the comic is a visually arresting piece with a sophisticated mix of watercolor-painted illustrations and photographs from the foundation’s archives. After searching through thousands of photos, Mr. Negron featured several of the most striking ones in the comic, including a family portrait of the Kelloggs in the 1800s, a picture of Mr. Kellogg making cornflakes, and even an X-ray of the head of Mr. Kellogg’s grandson after his fall.

“It’s amazing,” Mr. Negron says of the X-ray. “You can actually see the fracture of the skull.”

To comic-book aficionados, the art is reminiscent of Dave McKean, the artist who illustrated the covers of Sandman, Mr. Negron’s favorite comic-book series.

Mr. Negron began reading Sandman and other comic books — or graphic novels, as he often calls them — in high school, despite reservations by his parents. “They felt comic books were not really a valid literary form,” he says. But he attributes his interest in comics with helping him overcome dyslexia and increase his appreciation for reading.

The Kellogg Foundation is hoping its comic book will act as a similar learning tool for students in its home of Battle Creek, Mich. The grant maker has distributed the publication to high-school freshmen in the city to teach them the importance of performing charitable deeds. (Copies are available online at http://75.wkkf.org.)

The foundation also paid for Mr. Negron to fly to Battle Creek to be a part of a weekend of anniversary celebrations last month. During the festivities, which included a speech by Archbishop Desmond Tutu and an ice-cream social with an impersonator of Mr. Kellogg, Mr. Negron signed autographs of the foundation’s comic book, a first for the artist. “It was a little bit surreal,” he says.

Mr. Negron, who is now working as art director for Strings, an independent film about a young boy’s adventure with a superhero, says he credits the Kellogg project with teaching him about the foundation world and even helping him experiment with a new style of artwork.

But in at least one aspect, Mr. Negron’s experience exploring W.K. Kellogg’s life did not change him: He still does not enjoy cornflakes. “I don’t really eat cereal,” he says with a laugh.