I just read that Doug Marlette, known and loved by many in the Triangle, was killed in a traffic accident in Mississippi this morning:
According to the South Reporter, the accident occurred at 9:42 a.m. near the West Holly Springs exit on U.S. 78 East.
Marlette was the passenger in the vehicle, according to the newspaper. The driver, who has not been identified, was transported to Baptist Memorial Hospital in Oxford.
Rain may have been a factor in the accident. White said early morning rain had contributed to a number of accidents in north Mississippi today.
Marlette, in addition to being a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist, penned a successful cartoon strip, “Kudzu,” which later inspired a musical version that played at the Carolina Theatre some years ago. He served as Distinguished Visiting Professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the 2001-2002 academic year and was inducted into the UNC Journalism Hall of Fame in 2002. He will be missed by those who used to see him reading the paper and drinking coffee at Foster’s in Durham. Our thoughts and prayers go out to his family and friends.
UPDATE: Marlette, like most cartoonists, had to deal with controversy. Here’s a piece he wrote a few years ago after he offended some people by depicting Muslim terrorists in a cartoon:
I reminded readers that my “What Would Mohammed Drive?” drawing was an assault not upon Islam but on the distortion of the Muslim religion by murderous fanatics – the followers of Mohammed who flew those planes into our buildings, to be sure, but also the Taliban killers of noncompliant women and destroyers of great art, the true believers who decapitated an American reporter, the young Palestinian suicide bombers taking out patrons of pizza parlors in the name of the Prophet Mohammed.
