[UPDATE: I posted this Tuesday but then rewrote it extensively Wednesday morning.]
The Tulsa World reported Tuesday:
Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist Doug Marlette was killed Tuesday morning in a car crash.…The North Carolina native was riding in a car on a state highway near Byhalia, Miss. just before 10 a.m. Tuesday when the accident occurred. Byhalia is about 30 miles south of Memphis in northwest Mississippi.
Marlette had been in Charlotte, N.C., for the funeral of his father, Elmer Monroe Marlette. Services were held Friday.
Read it here:
http://www.tulsaworld.com/news/article.aspx?articleID=070710_1__MEMPH35828&breadcrumb=Breaking%20News
The (Raleigh) News & Observer reported:
Marlette, who lived in Hillsborough and Oklahoma, was on his way to Oxford, Miss., where high school students were preparing his musical “Kudzu” to present at a festival in Scotland in August. The play’s director had picked Marlette up at the airport in Memphis, Tenn., and was driving him to Oxford when he lost control of the Toyota pickup on a rain-drenched highway soon after 9:30 a.m. Marlette, 57, was killed instantly when the pickup hydroplaned and struck a tree, the Mississippi Highway Patrol reported. The driver, Oxford High School theater teacher John Davenport, 33, was taken to a hospital with relatively minor injuries.
Read The N&O story here:
http://www.newsobserver.com/news/story/633374.html
—
Wow. What a tragedy.
I always felt a bit of kinship to Doug Marlette. When I started drawing editorial cartoons for what was then called The Evening Herald of Rock Hill, S.C. (Circulation: 30,000) in 1983, Marlette was well-established as the cartoonist of The Charlotte Observer — The Herald’s main competition, up the road in the big city.
I can’t say he and I competed — he was the full-time professional and I drew mostly local issues, twice a week — but yeah, I always kinda felt like we were going head-to-head. Every morning, I’d dig into the Observer’s opinion section to see what he drew. Politically, Marlette was so far to the left of me that he made me look conservative.
Ed Williams was Marlette’s editor during his time in Charlotte.
I’ve known Doug — and been exasperated by him, and loved him — more than 30 years. He’s the only person I’ve worked with in journalism whom I consider a genius.
I was his editor for several years. It was a challenging relationship. He was bursting with provocative ideas. I decided whether he could put them in the newspaper. We did not always agree.
As a young cartoonist he often struggled to develop a concept into a cartoon. One day, immobilized by artist’s block, he went home early, leaving on his desk a note that said, “I can’t go on.”
With anyone else we might have feared it was a suicide note. With Doug we knew it was a passionate young man’s frustration at the difficulty of focusing his astonishing talent.
Read Williams’ memories of Marlette here:
http://www.charlotte.com/171/story/192520.html
Among the big issues in the region at the time was Jim and Tammy Bakker and the PTL club. As Marlette wrote at the Columbia Journalism Review:
Jim Bakker finally resigned in disgrace from his PTL ministry, and I drew a cartoon of the televangelist who replaced him, Jerry Falwell, as a serpent slithering into PTL paradise: “Jim and Tammy were expelled from paradise and left me in charge.”
One of the many angry readers who called me at the newspaper said, “You’re a tool of Satan.”
“Excuse me?”
“You’re a tool of Satan for that cartoon you drew.”
“That’s impossible,” I said. “I couldn’t be a tool of Satan. The Charlotte Observer’s personnel department tests for that sort of thing.”
Confused silence on the other end.
“They try to screen for tools of Satan,” I explained. “Knight Ridder human resources has a strict policy against hiring tools of Satan.”
Click.
Read more about that here:
http://cjrarchives.org/issues/2003/6/satan-marlette.asp
The Wednesday Washington Post related this tale:
“Since I heard the news, I have been thinking about all the people he [ticked] off,” says John Shelton Reed, who helped form the Center for the Study of the American South at the University of North Carolina and was a longtime Marlette friend. Off the top of his head, Reed lists the targets of Marlette’s lampoons: Jim Bakker, Catholics, Muslims. “I can’t think of a religious group he didn’t offend. He even did a cartoon that upset the Episcopalians, and you know how hard it is to upset Episcopalians.”
Read the Washington Post story here:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/10/AR2007071001898.html
Years later, I found myself in Athens, Ga., cartooning for what were, at the time, twin dailies under the same ownership: The Athens Daily News (a.m., 10,000) and The Banner-Herald (p.m., 12,000). And darned if the nearest major metro, The Atlanta Constitution, didn’t hire Marlette away from Charlotte, putting us “head-to-head” once again.
And then, to top it off, Marlette won the Pulitzer that year. Showoff.
See the cartoons that won the Pulitzer here:
http://dougmarlette.com/pages/pulitzTOONS.html
I eventually phased out of cartooning and got serious about infographics and news design. But I’ve always kept a huge interest in cartooning. Meanwhile, Marlette left Atlanta and worked for years with Newsday. He also drew a Southern-themed comic strip that I loved, “Kudzu.”
Flash forward a few years later when I worked at The (Raleigh, N.C.) News & Observer. Sharon and I bought tickets to see the NPR talk show, Whad’ya Know, broadcast live from the campus of the University of North Carolina. Much to my delight, one of the guests Michael Feldman had on the program that day was Doug Marlette.
Walking out of the auditorium that afternoon, I was happily babbling away about Marlette when I suddenly became aware the man was walking about eight paces in front of me. With some prodding from Sharon, I stepped up and introduced myself to him.
We must have chatted for maybe five minutes. He was the nicest guy.
Marlette worked for The Talahassee (Fla.) Democrat for a while and then moved to the Tulsa World. That’s for whom he drew when he died Wednesday.
Marlette’s final cartoons can be found here:
http://tulsaworld.com/opinion/marlette.aspx
Find Marlette’s web site here:
http://dougmarlette.com/
Marlette published a number of books — mostly collections of his cartoons, but also two novels. The most recent, Magic Time, came out last fall. From the review in The New York Times:
Doug Marlette, a self-aware Southern journalist and a promiscuous position-taker who worked briefly, years after McGill, for the same paper, doesn’t turn tail and doesn’t have much respect for those who do. Styling himself an “equal opportunity offender,” he’s spent decades attacking hypocrites and blowhards with his Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoons, in his “Kudzu” comic strip and most recently in fiction. “My talent is like a pit bull on a very long leash, and each day when I take it out for a stroll I hold on for dear life,” said the cartoonist-protagonist of Marlette’s first novel, “The Bridge” (2001). There’s no question Marlette was talking about himself.In “Magic Time,” Marlette’s second novel, he’s trying to put that dog on the scent of something big: his own vision of the South and Southerners, and, indeed, of America. Marlette wants to hunt out and attack the seminal issues - race, history, shame - that McGill wrote about. So he walks the trail back to the same moment, the early 1960’s, in a place, Mississippi, where choices were stark and, yes, very much required, yet many Southerners tried like hell not to make them.
I Loved this opening to Wednesday’s Washington Post story:
And then there was the time Doug Marlette joined a couple of friends on a porch in Beaufort, N.C., to watch wild ponies in a distant field.
“Doug sat there for about a minute,” recalls Bland Simpson. “It was all Doug could do to sit still. He was getting more and more agitated. Finally, he jumped up and said: ‘This is just too peaceful! There is nothing here for my free-ranging paranoia and hostility to light on.’ ”
He headed downtown to buy a newspaper.
I think we lost someone special Tuesday.
Best wishes, Mr. Marlette.
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