Requim For A Cartoonist
Remembering Doug Marlette (1949-2007)
Editor`s Note: Since our beginning in 1995, Christian Ethics Today readers have enjoyed the cartoons of Doug Marlette. His untimely death evoked many tributes, from which we have gleaned the following excerpts that remind us of Marlette`s role as a prophet with a pen.
From the Associated Press:
Doug Marlette, the North Carolina-born cartoonist who won a Pulitzer Prize and created the popular strip Kudzu, was killed in a car accident in Mississippi. Marlette was working in Oxford with a high school group that was doing a musical version of Kudzu.
Mr. Marlette said that his biting approach could be traced in part to "a grandmother bayoneted by a guardsman during a mill strike in the Carolinas. There are some rebellious genes floating around in me."
"Cartoons are windows into the human condition," he said once. "It`s about life."
From Kathleen Parker, Syndicated Columnist:
More shocking than the news of his death was the idea that Doug could die. I never really believed he was mortal.
No mere man could do all that Doug did-apparently without ever sleeping. He was otherwise transcendent, untethered to time or place, a cosmic vagabond in search of truth, omnivorous in his appetite for knowledge, insatiable in his quest for understanding.
Staying so consumed with projects "keeps me off the streets," he was fond of saying. Out of prison is what he meant.
Deeply, even painfully, empathetic, he saw (and felt) everyone`s struggle and granted compassion even toward the undeserving. But he struggled, too.
He was both hurt and baffled a few years ago when other writers in his hometown of Hillsborough, NC, tried to sabotage his largely autobiographical first novel, The Bridge-even getting it banned from the UNC bookstore-because they deemed some of his fictional characters too similar to themselves.
The public knew Doug primarily as cartoon boy. Funny Doug could make you laugh. Gimlet-eyed Doug could make you cringe. But the private Doug was a deep diver, a thinker of exquisite dimension who was most concerned with the profound tragedy of human existence. "How do any of us get through it?" he often wondered aloud.
The courage Doug bore witness to through his characters also found lodging in his brave heart. He was fearless against authority and hypocrisy. He stood fast when fundamentalists of all stripes issued death threats because of his cartoons. He was undaunted in defending the First Amendment, which he recognized as the foundation for all other freedoms.
"People don`t know anything anymore," he would say. "We have to stay alive so that we can keep getting the word out. Just get it out there."
"Out there" was the great big world, so in need of Doug`s rare gifts, but ultimately inadequate to contain his immense spirit.
May his legacy spread like kudzu.
From Mitch Geiman, CNN, who worked with Marlette at Newsday and was a friend.
During four decades as a cartoonist appearing in Charlotte, Atlanta, New York, Florida, and Oklahoma newspapers, as well as in syndication across the country, Marlette built a career as an equal-opportunity offender. He skewered Bill Clinton as easily as George Bush, Ross Perot as effortlessly as John Edwards; it`s not too farfetched to think that Mullah Omar and Jim Bakker might have found common ground in believing Marlette was an evil, vicious, godless rodent of a man.
In his work, Marlette was indiscriminate in trying to give voice to justice and to offer unbending support for the underdog. His spirit, he often said, was forged in the South he grew up in, where he was anti-war and anti-racism in a community grappling to come to terms with both Vietnam and civil rights in the 1960s.
His funeral was held Saturday, July 14, in a small, stone church outside Marlette`s hometown of Hillsborough, NC. The church is across the street from cornfields and farmland filled with hay bales, and not far from the site of the old textile mill where his grandparents worked in the 1930s.
The Red Clay Ramblers, a band Marlette collaborated with to score the musical version of his comic strip, Kudzu, played "I`ll Fly Away" to an overflow crowd of friends, family and followers.
How many people could attract to their funeral both one of the winningest coaches in college basketball history, Dean Smith, and Pat Conroy, a writer who found glory in a book called "My Losing Season"? In Marlette`s world, victory was measured not by the points you scored but by the points you made, not by banners raised or books published but by the character revealed during the inevitable struggles along the way.
No one was safe from Marlette`s biting wit, Conroy said. Especially if they were prone to take themselves too seriously. "I always thought it was going to be Doug giving the eulogy at my funeral," Conroy said from the simple pulpit, his face red with the strain of nearly a week`s sleepless, tearful nights. "He used to make up eulogies about me. The obituary would start: `An unknown writer died on Fripp Island . . . `"
At New York Newsday, where I worked as a reporter alongside Marlette, the paper had a slogan: "Truth, Justice, and the Comics." Marlette contributed a little of each. Eyes twinkling, mind racing, he pursued the truth, fought tirelessly against injustice and provided humor in his pictures and his text.
He lampooned the New York Times for lacking the guts to hire an editorial cartoonist for its op-ed pages. Any self-respecting newspaper in a democracy, he thought, had an obligation to use cartoons to convey its perspective and bring the subjects of its news coverage down to earth.
As the 20th century gave way to a new millennium, Marlette recognized the power of the Internet to create one-to-one communication and posted his cartoons online. He wrote two novels, The Bridge and Magic Time. But he was also drawn back to a family-owned newspaper, the Tulsa World. Some colleagues wondered why he would go to Oklahoma. Well, he explained, that`s the state that gave us Will Rogers and Woody Guthrie.
One of his friends said at the funeral that Marlette may have seen himself as part of the caravan of American thought that included Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Walker Percy, John Steinbeck, and Bob Dylan.
Indeed, when the cultural and political history of the turn of this century is written, understanding Marlette`s America-its truths, its ironies, and its oddly humorous conflicting motivations-will be central to any representation of the age.
From James M. Dunn in Report From the Capitol:
"We Baptists Gotta Stick Together-After All Nobody Else Will Have Us!".
These are the words Doug Marlette put in Will`s mouth. In 1990 the embattled Baptist Joint Committee asked Doug to allow the Rev. Will B. Dunn to give the late great Southern Baptist Convention some advice. That`s what Doug came up with, quite on his own. We put it on a button, wore it and handed it out at the convention. . . .
The Rev. Will B. Dunn came boldly to the comic page, full of foibles and fumbles, fully human but with a heavenly message. The editorial cartoons parsed political reality, punctured pretense, jabbed hypocrisy, and reduced phoniness to ridicule.
Bypass Baptist Church, served by Rev. Dunn, is spookily familiar. The weddings and funerals seem like live reports, not figments of fantasy. One suspects that with great good humor, Doug was exposing Baptists, as we are, warts and all. . . .
Doug Marlette saw the failures, the contradictions, the gaps, and the roughness of his region`s religiosity. He knew the experienced beauty and power of "baptistified." He accepted the notion that a god who could be defined is God denied. Tough stuff! So Doug`s faith, like kudzu, that damn vine, is ubiquitous.
Dang, Doug, we miss you already.
