By Marcy Hege

Doug Marlette
Doug Marlette’s name might be found on a Rare or Endangered Species list for editorial cartoonists. These days, that profession has less than 100 members here in the United States, a decline of more than half in the last twenty years. And, since Marlette’s work seems to drum up all kinds of controversy, one would think he should be a bit wary.

Marlette doesn’t discriminate with his subject matter. No religion gets a free pass. Called “a tool of Satan” by Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker when he drew about the PTL Club during his tenure at the Charlotte Observer, he also garnered the wrath of the Catholic Church and the Jewish community with some of his cartoons. One of his books, a collection of cartoons, bears the title, A Town So Backwards Even the Episcopalians Handle Snakes. Perhaps the cartoon drawing that received the most threats was What would Mohammed Drive? which generated tens of thousands of emails and newspaper coverage in the Arab world. Still in the world of religion, the preacher Will B. Dunn is a main character in the Kudzu comic strip and has a cult following around the world.

Politicians and politics also get a fair share of attention from Marlette. He’s made his points about Republicans and Democrats, once again not discriminating along political lines or lineage. Be it Clinton or Bush, red state or blue, liberal or conservative – all are fair game in Marlette’s editorial caricatures.

What kind of background produces someone like Doug Marlette? Born in Greensboro, he lived in Durham, North Carolina; Laurel, Mississippi; and Sanford, Florida while growing up as a cartoon-drawing military brat. Marlette loved Mad Magazine (can’t imagine the conversation as a military dad wonders what his son could possibly see in that magazine!) After graduation from Florida State University, his first drawing job was at The Charlotte Observer. While at the Charlotte paper in 1984, he became the first editorial cartoonist to win a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard. After the year at Harvard, he went back to the Charlotte Observer but moved to the Atlanta Constitution in 1987. While at the Atlanta paper, he won his first Pulitzer Prize. His next career move was to Newsday in New York . Eventually, his Southern roots began to call and Marlette returned to North Carolina.

Marlette settled into Burnside, a historic house in Hillsborough with wife, Melinda, a Southerner he met while working at The Charlotte Observer. Their son, Jackson, will be leaving soon to attend the Parsons School of Design. Two Maltese cats, Louie and Sophie, round out the household.

Back in his birth state, Marlette was appointed to a Distinguished Visiting Professorship in the School of Journalism and Mass Communications at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. He was inducted into the UNC Journalism Hall of Fame in 2001 and served on the UNC J-School’s Board of Visitors. He now works for Tulsa World, a family-owned newspaper in Oklahoma and is a visiting professor at Oklahoma University.

Evidently, Marlette has more energy than most of us. In addition to producing the Kudzu comic strip daily along with weekday production of editorial cartoons, the cartoonist also has a literary side. His first novel, The Bridge published in 2001, was set in the then and now of Eno, a fictional mill town environment of Orange and Alamance Counties of the 1930s and the Boomer-turned politically-correct materialism of the 1990s. Marlette’s ancestral roots are in the Orange/Alamance area and his (real) grandmother was a union leader during the millworker strikes of the 1930s. She was even bayoneted by National Guardsmen at the Burlington plant. Marlette was touched when he realized that the mill owners who had built his current historic house were the very same people who had called in the National Guard to arrest his grandmother. The Bridge brought its own controversy to Marlette’s current life as a few current Hillsborough residents felt they were portrayed poorly in his book.

In typical Marlette fashion, his second novel, Magic Time, tackles another controversial issue here in the South, race and civil rights. Using Mississippi as its prime setting while focusing on time frames during the Freedom Summer of 1964 and in the 1990s, Marlette relates the tale of a Southerner transplanted to New York who returns to his childhood town to recuperate and regroup following a nervous breakdown brought on by terrorist bombings in the Big Apple. But, his return to his hometown brings on a confrontation with the ghosts of his past, the bombings and burnings during the Civil Rights Movement. Magic Time, published in hardback in 2006, is scheduled for release in paperback in June.

Currently working on his next novel, Marlette was quite emphatic when asked if he had any goals in his sights these days. “My goal is to have no goals,” he quipped.
In response to the standard Fifty & Fabulous interview question of “Did you have any idea you would be where you are today when you were younger?” elicited this revelation from Marlette, “I had no idea I would become a writer but in my earlier cartoons, Kudzu wanted to be a writer.”

Marlette is a defender of freedom of speech, almost to the point of a zealot. As he wrote in Nieman Reports, Winter 2004 issue, “When we don’t exercise our freedom of expression in troublesome ways, we may atrophy our best impulses. 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 of ideas, it obligates journalists to be bold, writers to be fullthroated and uninhibited, and those blunt instruments of the free press, cartoonists like me, not to self-censor. In order not to lose it, we must use it, swaggering and unapologetic.”

No apologies, no hiding from the truth. Doug Marlette is indeed a rare and one-of-a kind Fifty & Fabulous!

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