Clarion-Ledger, Jackson, Mississippi
Wednesday, July 11, 2007

'Kudzu' cartoonist killed in vehicle crash

Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist Doug Marlette was on his way to Oxford on Tuesday to help a troupe of high school students put on a play based on his nationally syndicated comic strip, Kudzu.

The play and the comic strip, which friends say drew on themes from his own boyhood in the South, including Laurel, were just a portion of Marlette's expanding artistic endeavors that inspired, delighted and angered people for decades.

That career came to an end on a rainy stretch of U.S. 78 just outside the city of Holly Springs in north Mississippi when the 2002 Toyota Tacoma he was riding in lost control and struck a tree just before 10 a.m. Marlette, 57, was killed instantly, Marshall County coroner John Garrison said.

The driver, Oxford High School theater director John Davenport, was taken to Baptist Memorial Hospital in Oxford, where he was treated and released within a few hours.

Marlette, who had been editorial cartoonist for The Tulsa World for a little more than a year, is survived by his wife, Melinda, and son, Jackson. He previously had been the cartoonist for The Charlotte Observer, New York Newsday, The Tallahassee Democrat and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where he won a Pulitzer in 1988.

Marlette was on his way to Oxford to spend a few days with the theater company as they prepared to perform the musical at a festival in Scotland, Oxford High School principal Bill Hovious said.

"Our theater community here (is) terribly upset because Mr. Marlette had been down here and worked with them for two days earlier," he said. "It's a real tragedy to all of us. All of us have got his family in our prayers."

To some, the news brought eerie echoes of the death of Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Halberstam, who died as a passenger in a multi-car accident near San Francisco in April.

"It's been a difficult year. First, Halberstam and now Doug," said Bill Kovach, chairman and acting director of the Committee of Concerned Journalists.

Kovach hired Marlette when Kovach was editor of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

"I wanted the best political cartoonist in the country, and Doug Marlette, as far as I was concerned, was the one we had to have," he said.

Marlette's cartoons carried an emotional punch, he said.

"Marlette, better than any artist I know, understood visual communication and how visual communication forced you to confront issues directly," he said. "We lost a great artist."

Clarion-Ledger cartoonist Marshall Ramsey grew up in the Atlanta area while Marlette was at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and said Marlette was a role model. The two met in November when Marlette came to Jackson to promote his second novel, Magic Time.

"I grew up reading Doug's cartoons. My mom gave me one of his books when I was learning how to be a cartoonist. I studied it like a text," he said. "What a sad reminder of how fragile life is. A talent was snuffed out today."

That talent occasionally rubbed some the wrong way.

While working for The Tallahassee Democrat in 2002, Marlette drew a cartoon portraying a Middle Eastern-looking man driving a truck carrying a nuclear bomb with the caption, "What would Muhammad drive?" In interviews, Marlette said he received more than 4,500 angry e-mails about the cartoon, including some death threats, but he continued to defend the cartoon.

Marlette was born in Greensboro, N.C., but his family moved to Laurel when he was young. He attended Laurel Junior High and Laurel High School before his family moved again to Florida.

"He always had just such a great, great sense of humor and always was laughing," said longtime friend Dr. Steve Ellis, a dentist in Laurel. "A lot of the themes in Kudzu came from his days in Laurel."

Kovach said Marlette was a friendly conversationalist but could be "very intense" and preferred to wrestle over politics and the news of the day.

"Doug was not just a thinking, feeling human being but a great citizen," he said.

Robert Lorton III, president and publisher of The Tulsa World, said his newspaper is grieving over the loss.

"This is a great tragedy, not only for the Tulsa World family but for all that knew Doug," he said. "He was more than a great cartoonist and author. He was a tremendous human being. Words cannot express the grief that we are all feeling today. Our hearts go out to Melinda and all of Doug's family."