HOLLY SPRINGS, Miss. (ABP) — Doug Marlette, whose editorial cartoons often lampooned fundamentalist religion but whose folksy comic strip celebrated a rural Southern Baptist pastor, was killed in an automobile accident July 10. He was 57.
The Pulitzer Prize winner, who recently joined the staff of the Tulsa World, died near Holly Springs, Miss., reportedly after a truck in which he was a passenger careened off a rain-slicked highway.
According to the World and other news outlets, Marlette had been en route from the Memphis airport to Oxford, Miss. He was helping with a high school production of a musical based on his syndicated “Kudzu” comic strip, which lovingly — but insightfully — depicted life in his native South.
Marlette had just flown in from North Carolina, where he had delivered a eulogy at his father's funeral in Charlotte on July 6.
“The creator endowed him with such creativity that he was literally one of a kind — and a real Baptist,” said James Dunn, former executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty. He and Marlette had struck up a friendship in 1972, when both were speakers for a meeting at Crescent Hill Baptist Church in Louisville, Ky.
“He could see the ironies and the contradictions [in political or religious life] so clearly and then reduce them to just a few strokes in a cartoon,” Dunn said.
Dunn and another famous progressive Baptist preacher, Will Campbell, were reportedly the inspiration for one of the lead characters in “Kudzu,” a small-town Baptist preacher named Will B. Dunn.
James Dunn said Marlette, who was raised Southern Baptist, was strongly committed to the doctrinal distinctives that moderate Baptists celebrate, especially the priesthood of all believers and the separation of church and state.
“He was intensely committed to the notion that religion is ultimately a matter between the individual and God,” Dunn said.
Marlette won the Pulitzer for editorial cartooning in 1988, after a series of drawings skewering the Religious Right's increasing involvement in secular politics. They included one depicting Jerry Falwell as a snake in the Garden of Eden.
However, according to Dunn, Marlette “was an equal offender — he went after whomever was a good target of the day.” Among his other frequent targets for cartooning ridicule were his fellow Baptist Bill Clinton and Pope John Paul II.
Marlette's fiery depictions sometimes got him in trouble. In 2002, he received heavy criticism from Islamic groups over a cartoon that depicted an Arab-looking man driving a rental truck with a nuclear bomb hanging out the back. The caption read, “What Would Muhammad Drive?”
In a Tallahassee Democrat guest column responding to the criticism, Marlette wrote: “In my 30-year career I have regularly drawn cartoons that offend religious fundamentalists and true believers of every stripe, a fact that I tend to list in the ‘accomplishments' column of my résumé. I have outraged fundamentalist Christians by skewering Jerry Falwell, Roman Catholics by needling the pope, and Jews by criticizing Israel. I have vast experience upsetting people with my art.”
The North Carolina native divided his time between his home in Hillsborough, near Raleigh, and Tulsa.
Marlette was born in Greensboro, N.C., and also lived in Mississippi and Florida as a youngster. He graduated from Florida State University, where he began his cartooning career for the campus newspaper.
Soon after graduating, Marlette got a job at the Charlotte Observer, where he first rose to national prominence. He went on to work at newspapers in Atlanta and New York. He was at the Tallahassee paper before moving to Tulsa.
He reportedly took the Tulsa World job because he wanted to support a family-owned newspaper against the rising tide of corporate journalism.
In 1981, Marlette was the first cartoonist to be awarded a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University — the most prestigious award for journalists in mid-career.
In recent years, he published two novels, both of which earned critical acclaim as well as some disapproval from his Hillsborough neighbors. His first novel, The Bridge, included characters based on some other local writers that they found unflattering.
Marlette's fieriness may have been genetic. His grandmother had been involved in the infamous textile workers' strike in Hillsborough in which the plant owner summoned the National Guard in order to placate the women trying to organize a union.
“She stepped out of line and got bayoneted by a national guardsman,” Dunn noted, echoing a story that Marlette often told.
But Dunn noted the Marlette family got the last laugh. In settling in Hillsborough, Marlette and his wife purchased the very house that had belonged to the plant owner.
“What goes around comes around,” Dunn said.
Marlette is survived by his wife, Melinda, and an adult son, Jackson. Funeral details were not available by press time for this story.
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