Ideas Emerging

I am interrupting my previously scheduled posting hiatus this summer to point out the following piece on Doug Marlette by the Washington Post’s Linton Weeks. Fantastic. Back when I was working on The Daily Tar Heel editorial page, we used to “run a Marlette” whenever our student cartoonists were unavailable. We were all big fans. Anyway, I figured it was worth breaking my self-imposed ban on summer posting to give a little more attention to this great artist and great North Carolinian.

A Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist, Marlette was also a comic strip writer, novelist, librettist — and a Southerner through and through.

Not the calm, genteel, conflict-averse kind of Southerner, mind you. He was a prickly pear, a stubborn and restless rebel. With countless causes.

“Since I heard the news, I have been thinking about all the people he [ticked] off,” says John Shelton Reed, who helped form the Center for the Study of the American South at the University of North Carolina and was a longtime Marlette friend. Off the top of his head, Reed lists the targets of Marlette’s lampoons: Jim Bakker, Catholics, Muslims. “I can’t think of a religious group he didn’t offend. He even did a cartoon that upset the Episcopalians, and you know how hard it is to upset Episcopalians.”

~ ND