photo: Charlotte Observer

.

Doug Marlette, a Pulitzer-winning cartoonist and North Carolina native, was killed this morning in a single-car accident in Mississippi. Marlette’s controversial editorial cartoons and his comic strip, Kudzu, are syndicated worldwide. Read more.

Marlette was interviwed by Valerie MacEwan in the Spring (April) issue of The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature and had been a friend of Val’s for many years. His newest novel, Magic Time, has just been released.

A true southerner, Marlette told Val MacEwan,

“I write about the South and draw about it because it is what I know and because I believe it is where America reveals itself to itself. This nation, historically, seems to have been destined to forge its soul on southern terrain, to come into itself as a nation on the red clay and piney woods of our region. The South is where it has always played out its problems most vividly, fought and bled and suffered over its most basic principles, and where it has discovered its deepest convictions.

Our national spirit of rebellion, revolution and independence has always found some of its most passionate, eloquent voices in southerners from Patrick Henry, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson to Martin Luther King, Jr. We, as a nation and a people, came into ourselves during the crucible of the Civil War, the struggle for union fought mostly on southern soil, when we went from thinking of ourselves as a loose collective of disparate, individual states to thinking of ourselves for the first time as the United States of America. The civil rights movement of the Sixties, the struggle to extend and fulfill the promise of the Constitution to all of our citizens was fought and also played out on Dixie’s terrain.

And now the economic energy of the nation has shifted South, as has political power, with Southerners in control of the White House and Congress, the view from the bridge to the 21st century in a global economy seems to be one of a distinctly Southern perspective.”

Doug Marlette was Friend of the Mule who will be missed. He is survived by his wife and a grown son. May he rest in peace.

******

UPDATE: July 11, 2007

Response from the Mule and Val MacEwan and on her other blog, “The world just became an awful place.”

Val’s favorite Doug Marlette quote:

“People used to say to Kurt Vonnegut “you write short.” When they met him he was taller than they expected. I used to get something like that with my cartoons. I apparently draw like a short dark, bearded guy. But am actually tallish, and alarmingly have this somewhat affable, open- faced quality, like some Sunbelt Rotarian. It confuses people. They’re surprised when my inner pit bull shows itself.”

–Doug Marlette

 

 

See more links at The Tulsa World, where Marlette worked.