From the archives: Doug Marlette

This story was originally published in Newsday on July 11, 2007

Doug Marlette, creator of the comic strip Kudzu and a former Newsday editorial cartoonist whose incisive, sometimes controversial work won the Pulitzer Prize, was killed yesterday in a car crash in Mississippi.

Marlette, 57, was on his way to Oxford, Miss., when the pickup truck he was riding in slipped on the wet highway and crashed into a tree in the northwest part of the state near Holly Springs, authorities said. He was killed instantly, said novelist Pat Conroy, a good friend of Marlette's. Police are investigating the crash.

"This is just a devastating loss," Conroy said. "He could do it all and do it well."

Marlette, who lived in Hillsborough, N.C., and Tulsa, Okla., won every major award for editorial cartooning. With worldwide syndication, his work was seen by millions.

While working for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the Charlotte Observer, Marlette won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988 for cartoons lampooning televangelist Jim Bakker, presidential candidates George H.W. Bush and Michael Dukakis, and Oliver North.

He joined Newsday a year later and amazed editors with his work ethic. By 10 a.m., Marlette knew what he would draw for the following day's paper, colleagues recalled.

"Most days, by the time we finished our morning meeting, he would have his cartoons done, beautifully drawn, on great big sheets of paper in India ink," Carol Richards, former deputy editor of the editorial pages, said.

Marlette's Newsday cartoons skewered fellow Southerner Bill Clinton, with one saying that a future monument to him should take the form of a giant zipper.

"He gave us a real emotional wallop," said James Klurfeld, Newsday's editorial pages editor. "Day in and day out, he was always entertaining. He was always acerbic."

"He had a very bold drawing style and he was unafraid to take on any topic," Newsday cartoonist Walt Handelsman said.

Marlette's most famous cartoons used religious imagery and often sparked powerful emotions. His most notorious came after he left Newsday in 2002. Titled "What Would Mohammed Drive?" it featured a Ryder truck rigged with a bomb and driven by a Muslim man. It was published on the Web site of the Tallahassee Democrat in December 2002.

Marlette received thousands of e-mails, many of them death threats. "Cartoons are the acid test of the First Amendment," he wrote for the journalism magazine Nieman Reports at Harvard University.

Marlette began drawing political cartoons in 1972 for The Charlotte Observer. He most recently worked for the Tulsa World.

In 1981, he launched Kudzu, a strip set in the rural South. A native North Carolinian, Marlette "was really known for capturing the Southern voice," said Rob Rogers, president of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists. "He never gave up those roots."

What separated Marlette was the range of his talents, friends and colleagues said. He wrote two novels, compiled his work in 19 volumes, penned a how-to book for aspiring editorial cartoonists, produced a stage version of Kudzu and was the only editorial cartoonist accepted as a Nieman fellow.

Conroy described Marlette as "restless, a spiderous person who has nerve endings everywhere. Awake all the time and at work all the time."

Marlette is survived by his wife, Melinda, and an adult son, Jackson. Funeral information was not available.