"Kudzu" Cartoonist Doug Marlette Killed in Crash

[WilliamPitt]

Cartoonist Doug Marlette Killed in Crash
By MARTHA WAGGONER
The Associated Press

Tuesday, July 10, 2007; 3:23 PM

RALEIGH, N.C. -- Doug Marlette, the North Carolina-born cartoonist who won a Pulitzer Prize and created the popular strip "Kudzu," was killed in a car accident Tuesday morning in Mississippi, authorities said. He was 57.

Marlette, who joined the Tulsa (Okla.) World last year, was the passenger in the car, which struck a tree after skidding on a rain-slicked road, said John Garrison, the coroner in Mississippi's Marshall County.

"Evidently, it hydroplaned, left the highway and struck the tree," Garrison said.

More: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/10/AR2007071001034.html?hpid=moreheadlines

[supernova]

1. Really lovely man

I met him at a friend's book club at their home several years ago. It was a meeting for The Bridge, his book about the 30s Labor movement in NC, largely a forgotten chapter in our history.

I'm definitely going to miss him. RIP, Doug.

[rateyes]

2. Oh no. I loved Kudzu, and Marlette was a really

nice guy. RIP, Doug.

[judaspriestess]

3. RIP

[democrat in Tallahassee]

4. He went to school here at FSU. Sucks. n/t

[Maddy McCall]

5. He loosely modeled Will B. Dunn after Will D. Campbell.

If you've never read any of Will Campbell's books, you don't know what you're missing.

Check out "Brother to a Dragonfly." It will teach you so much about the complexities of the Deep South.

(Will Campbell was an ordained baptist deacon who received his doctorate at Yale and later went on to help Martin Luther King Jr. found the SCLC. Also escorted the Little Rock Nine into Central High School. He's a phenomenal man.)

Take just a moment to check out this link:

http://www.alabamatv.org/news/godswill.htm

And read this short snippet about Campbell's book:


Will Campbell's Brother to a Dragonfly exemplifies the interconnectedness a southerner perceives between self, family, morality, and community. Like Lillian Hellman's outstanding autobiography, Pentimento (1973), Campbell's autobiography views the author through a portrait of another. The lives of Will and Joe Campbell intertwine within the context of Mississippi social history. In the Campbell family, each brother's identity is assigned and unquestioned. Joe is the worker; Will is the preacher. Through tales of mischief, Will recalls their childhood: his nearly burning down an outhouse or fooling the WPA when they tested southern schoolchildren for hookworm. As youngsters, the brothers are intimate friends, but their lives diverge during adulthood after Will attends Yale and receives what Joe calls his "bachelor's of sophistication." When desegregation and civil rights become Will's mission during the 1950s, the brothers find themselves on opposite sides of racial issues. Joe increasingly adopts the role of the dragonfly—grasping for stability and security where there is none, becoming addicted to sedatives and amphetamines, and finally committing suicide. Brother to a Dragonfly describes two responses to the historical changes that affected 20th-century southern life: the Depression, World War II, integration, and the civil rights movement. Will and Joe Campbell's lives are "bound inextricably together . . . sometimes in a nearness approaching, surpassing illness. And sometimes so far apart that neither could hear the cry of the other."

http://docsouth.unc.edu/southlit/autobio.html

[BurtWorm]

6. Very sorry to hear about this.

[marions ghost]

7. I'm very sorry to hear this...

Marlette was clearly one of the true liberal fighters -- a witty and imaginative cartoonist and writer. I'm sad today that his creative voice is silenced. Deepest condolences to his family.

:cry: :patriot:

Although best known for his cartoons, Marlette's second work of fiction -Magic Time- is out in hardback and due to come out soon in paperback. It's about the Civil Rights era and takes place in Mississippi. Here's a review:
http://dougmarlette.com/pages/kirkus.html

"Magic Time is a beautiful memorial to the brave young people who made the ultimate sacrifice in Mississippi during Freedom Summer, 1964. Doug Marlette has vividly captured the spirit of history that animated those of us who were part of that extraordinary time." —U.S. Congressman John Lewis

-----------------

I also really enjoyed his first book, The Bridge, and know the area he describes very well. I have to say that he captures the essence of the place, although it touched off a serious tempest in a teapot around Chapel Hill.

I highly recommend the book, & here's a little tidbit about it:

By Todd Morman
Spectator Weekly, Raleigh, NC

So you like Southern writers.
Have we got a story for you.

It involves the small community of Hillsborough, North Carolina, the model for a novelist's fictional town, just as Asheville was for Thomas Wolfe - or more appropriately to this story, as Mt. Airy was for Andy Griffith's Mayberry.

Like many first novelists, Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Doug Marlette (known primarily for the comic strip Kudzu) pulled liberally from his own life when writing his new book The Bridge. The novel, a family story exploring the tragic local dimensions of the General Textile Strike that swept the South in 1934, features a very Marlette-like protagonist and is set in a small town not unlike Marlette's own Hillsborough.

Throughout the book, Marlette refers to actual people and events. The key character Mama Lucy, for example, is based on Marlette's grandother, who was bayoneted by a National Guardsman in Burlington during the strike. A whimsical minor character called the Dildo King, owner of Garden of Eden Enterprises, an adult video and sex toy business, seems rooted in Phil Harvey and his sex-products company Adam & Eve, which happens to be one of the real town's largest employers.

You need to know two things about Hillsborough before going on. First, it has only 5,500 residents. Second, a disproportionate number of those residents are nationally known authors. One of them is Alan Gurganus, author of Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All and Plays Well With Others, who lives on the same street as Marlette. Gurganus saw himself in one of Marlette's characters and took great offense. His reaction set off a chain of events that divided this formerly friendly community and prompted some of its literary sophisticates to behave more like Mayberry provincials.(snip)
--More at http://dougmarlette.com/pages/LookingHomeward.html

[spanone]

8. damn............

:graybox:

[marions ghost]

9. What Would Mohammed Drive?

Here's Marlette talking about the controversy that surrounded his cartoon "What would Mohammed Drive?"

It's worth reading. Here are excerpts:

http://cjrarchives.org/issues/2003/6/satan-marlette.asp

I Was a Tool of Satan
An Equal-Opportunity Offender Maps the Dark Turn of Intolerance

BY DOUG MARLETTE

Last year, I drew a cartoon that showed a man in Middle Eastern apparel at the wheel of a Ryder truck hauling a nuclear warhead. The caption read, "What Would Mohammed Drive?" Besides referring to the vehicle that Timothy McVeigh rode into Oklahoma City, the drawing was a takeoff on the "What Would Jesus Drive?" campaign created by Christian evangelicals to challenge the morality of owning gas-guzzling SUVs. The cartoon's main target, of course, was the faith-based politics of a different denomination. Predictably, the Shiite hit the fan.

Can you say "fatwa"? My newspaper, The Tallahassee Democrat, and I received more than 20,000 e-mails demanding an apology for misrepresenting the peace-loving religion of the Prophet Mohammed — or else. Some spelled out the "else": death, mutilation, Internet spam. "I will cut your fingers and put them in your mother's ass." "What you did, Mr. Dog, will cost you your life. Soon you will join the dogs . . . hahaha in hell." "Just wait . . . we will see you in hell with all jews . . . ." The onslaught was orchestrated by an organization called the Council on American-Islamic Relations. CAIR bills itself as an "advocacy group." I was to discover that among the followers of Islam it advocated for were the men convicted of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. At any rate, its campaign against me included flash-floods of e-mail intended to shut down servers at my newspaper and my syndicate, as well as viruses aimed at my home computer. The controversy became a subject of newspaper editorials, columns, Web logs, talk radio, and CNN. I was condemned on the front page of the Saudi publication Arab News by the secretary general of the Muslim World League. (snip)

With the rise of the bottom-line culture and the corporatization of newsgathering, tolerance itself has become commodified and denuded of its original purpose. Consequently, the best part of the American character - our generous spirit, our sense of fair play - has been turned against us. Tolerance has become a tool of coercion, of institutional inhibition, of bureaucratic self-preservation. We all should take pride in how this country for the most part curbed the instinct to lash out at Arab-Americans in the wake of 9/11. One of the great strengths of this nation is our sensitivity to the tyranny of the majority, our sense of justice for all. But the First Amendment, the miracle of our system, is not just a passive shield of protection. In order to maintain our true, nationally defining diversity, it obligates journalists to be bold, writers to be full-throated and uninhibited, and those blunt instruments of the free press, cartoonists like me, not to self-censor. We must use it or lose it.

Political cartoonists daily push the limits of free speech. They were once the embodiment of journalism's independent voice. Today they are as endangered a species as bald eagles. The professional troublemaker has become a luxury that offends the bottom-line sensibilities of corporate journalism. Twenty years ago, there were two hundred of us working on daily newspapers. Now there are only ninety. Herblock is dead. Jeff MacNelly is dead. And most of the rest of us might as well be. Just as résumé hounds have replaced newshounds in today's newsrooms, ambition has replaced talent at the drawing boards. Passion has yielded to careerism, Thomas Nast to Eddie Haskell. With the retirement of Paul Conrad at the Los Angeles Times, a rolling blackout from California has engulfed the country, dimming the pilot lights on many American editorial pages. Most editorial cartoons now look as bland as B-roll and as impenetrable as a 1040 form. (snip)

What would Marlette drive?

If I drew you a picture it might look like the broken-down jalopy driven by the Joads from Oklahoma to California. Or like the Cadillac that Jack Kerouac took on the road in his search for nirvana. Or the pickup Woody Guthrie hitched a ride in on that ribbon of highway, bound for glory. Or the International Harvester Day-Glo school bus driven cross-country by Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters. Or the Trailways and Greyhound buses the Freedom Riders boarded to face the deadly backroads of Mississippi and Alabama. Or the moonbuggy Neil Armstrong commanded on that first miraculous trip to the final frontier.

What would Marlette drive? The self-evident, unalienable American model of democracy that we as a young nation discovered and road-tested for the entire world: the freedom to be ourselves, to speak the truth as we see it, and to drive it home.

[hfojvt]

10. shouldn't this Kudzu thread be in the Lounge?

I enjoyed many of his cartoons in the books I sold in my store, or tried to sell. They ended up in my collection. I believe he got a Pulitzer for drawing a crying eagle after the Challenger disaster.

I was sorry to hear about this. Maybe another cartoonist could draw a crying Will B. Dunn.

[marions ghost]

11. R U serous 111!!!!-- this topic is not worthy for GD?

"Cartoons are the acid test of the First Amendment." Marlette

[WilliamPitt]

12. See post 10.

He was also an editorial cartoonist.



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Note the name in the lower left corner.

[marions ghost]

13. thanx for posting Will

1 more kick for the road.

Adios