Just heard that Doug Marlette, formerly of The Charlotte Observer, creator of "Kudzu," has been killed in a car crash. An excerpt from the Observer‘s story:
Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist Doug Marlette, an N.C. native and former Observer cartoonist, was killed in a single-car accident this morning in Mississippi, authorities said. He was 57.
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It was terribly sad to see this item in the news this morning. I grew up in Charlotte in the 70’s when Marlette was just starting to rile up the populace with his cartoons, and on my trips home from college in the late 70’s and early 80’s my parents would have clipped and saved for me his latest takes on Jim Bakker or Jesse Helms or the latest fool of the week…He was a hero in our house, and it was really remarkable that the Observer (which was a remarkable paper overall in terms of its progressivism in those days) kept Marlette on when they were deluged with hate mail from those who thought he was an agent of Satan for criticizing PTL, etc., etc.
When he went on to Newsday I continued to enjoy his cartoons while I lived in NYC. but it was the fact that, as an editorial cartoonist in his Charlotte days, he seemed willing to thumb his nose at the prevailing political winds in his community rather than just being led by those sentiments, that was the most impressive thing about him.
Weird too isn’t it, that within a year two journalistic titans are lost in car crashes while being driven by somebody else on the way to a lecture or gig of some type, David Halberstam being the other.
Thanks, Phillip, good to hear from you.
FYI, Robert Ariail has a nice cartoon tribute ready for tomorrow’s paper.
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