Doug Marlette, 1949-2007



Doug Marlette, a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist, an award-winning author, and a successful, nationally syndicated strip cartoonist, died yesterday morning in Marshall County, Mississippi. Marlette was the passenger in a car that struck a tree while driving on a wet road.

Marlette was born in Greensboro, North Carolina. His official biography says he was raised in North Carolina, Mississippi and Florida. The five-member Marlette moved around because of the patriarch's career as a medic in the Marine Corp. While in Florida, still in high school, Marlette took a job at the Sanford Herald. After going to Seminole Community College for two years, a period in which he worked for an Orlando paper, Marlette transferred to Florida State University. There he worked on the campus paper as a cartoonist. Upon graduating from Florida State University in 1971, Marlette worked for the St. Petersburg Times for a half year before he began a long and distinguished career as an editorial cartoonist in earnest by moving to the Charlotte Observer in 1972. After working there for several years he moved to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 1987, winning a Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning for work split between the two papers in 1988. His submitted cartoons hit very heavily on the rise and tabloid follies of Southern evangelical leaders.

Marlette moved to a number of publications after the Journal-Constitution: New York Newsday (beginning in 1989), Tallahassee Democrat (2002) and his current position at Tulsa World (2006). His work was syndicated starting in 1975, the same year of his first book's publication.

Marlette launched the syndicated strip Kudzu in 1981, which Don Markstein notes was part of a trend at the time for successful editorial cartoonists like Marlette, Jeff MacNelly and Mike Peters. Kudzu was steeped in southern and religious culture, which sets it apart in strip history. Markstein notes that a live-action pilot went unsold in 1983 and was produced ten years later on stage as a musical comedy: Kudzu, A Southern Musical. Ten years after that a cast CD was produced. According to Marlette's official biography, the play was published by the Samuel French company.

Nineteen volumes of his comics works have been published.

As if those accomplishments and the accompanying cross-appearances of his work on television and in magazines weren't enough to fill his schedule, Marlette wrote a novel, The Bridge, which was published in 2001 and won approbation on important year-end lists. A follow-up work called Magic Time was released in 2006 with a paperback edition out last month. He also taught, at the University of North Carolina and the University of Oklahoma, and wrote for several publications, including Esquire and Salon.

Marlette was an potent essayist and castigated the West for its stance on the 2006 Danish Cartoons Controversy. He drew one of the more notorious editorial cartoons in recent history, reprinted above. That cartoon's ironic exclusion from David Wallis' recent book on killed cartoons became its own news story.

In addition to the Pulitzer, Marlette won three National Headliners Awards, two Fischetti first place awards, and two Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Awards. He is the only cartoonist to win one of Harvard's Nieman Fellowship.

Doug Marlette was 57 years old.
 
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