Going Back to BypassbyHenry L. Carrigan, Jr.Doug Marlette died this past week (Tuesday, July 10), and the South lost a brilliant soul and its most contentious, brutally honest, charming, loveable and evocative voices since Thomas Wolfe. He died in a car crash in Mississippi on a rain-slick highway when he was coming back from a local production of “Kudzu,” the comic strip that forever imprinted on our hearts the small town of Bypass and its loveable denizens, Kudzu, Veranda and Reverend Will B. Dunn, the preacher based on Marlette’s good friend, Southern Baptist pastor and civil rights activist, Will B. Campbell. Marlette’s many obituaries recall the bare facts of his life. He was born in Greensboro, North Carolina, and grew up in Durham, N.C., Laurel, Mississippi, and Sanford, Florida. He began his career drawing political cartoons for the Charlotte Observer in 1972, where I first encountered his work. Since his work was nationally syndicated, I could find them in various papers in the towns where I lived in the ‘70s. He left the Observer and went to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 1987, worked for Newsday (1989-2002), the Tallahassee Democrat (2006-2006), and had been at the Tulsa World since 2006. He divided his time between Tulsa and Hillsborough, North Carolina, a little town (well, not real little any longer) on the outskirts of Chapel Hill and Durham, North Carolina. I first met Marlette through his political cartoons, which, to me at the time, combined the earthy, humorous and wily nod-and-wink of Walt Kelly’s Pogo cartoons (of which I could never get enough) and the more sobering commentary of a wise observer of a quickly deteriorating national political scene. (It was the early to mid-seventies, after all, and as far as I could tell, the world was going to hell in a handbasket with Nixon in the driver’s seat; not unlike today, only the driver has changed.) I couldn’t get enough of Marlette at the time, even cutting out many of his cartoons and pasting them on my door. I’m sorry that in my several moves that I’ve now lost most of them. I do, however, still possess several collections of the Kudzu comic strip. Back when the daily papers I read still had a comics page (and back then we still got a morning and afternoon paper, so I got two comics pages, each with favorites), Kudzu burst into that world with a teenage wisdom beyond his years and a Southern boy’s take on love, family, friendship, politics and religion. The main character, a teenaged boy named after the ubiquitous green vine that grows willy-nilly all over the Southern countryside, became my daily companion every afternoon, and I laughed and cried along with Kudzu. As much as he longed to get out of Bypass—a really great name that works on so many levels of meaning: after the interstate highways were built—so many Southern towns really were bypassed or reachable only “off the bypass”; life in the town, as Kudzu himself says, is “passin’ you by”—the life in that town reminded me so much of the small South Carolina town where many of my relatives lived, so a daily trip to Bypass was a trip to my past. Once the Reverend Will B. Dunn sauntered onto the scene, Kudzu suddenly took off to a new level. I imagine it was because I went to seminary and tussled with religious ideas about the nature of souls and the purpose of the church—not to mention how to handle the congregation of a small church set back in tobacco fields where everyone is family (literally), and where outside preachers are suspect until they light up a cigarette. I imagine as well that I knew and loved the work of Will Campbell, whose Brother to a Dragonfly (one of the most lyrical “memoirs” ever written) simply confirmed for me that you could be a religious authority and still write evocatively and poetically. I mean, here’s a preacher quoting Walker Percy—with whom he was good friends—and Meister Eckhart (13th-century mystic) in the same breath. Campbell’s book surely played some part in my following the path that I have followed. At any rate, I always looked for the strips featuring Will B. Dunn. One strip features the good Reverend walking down the sidewalk after a basketball game for his team called the Holy Rollers. He’s bemoaning the fact that he’s been hit with a technical foul during the game and complains that the referees discriminate against Protestants. “If Catholics can make the sign of the cross before each free throw,” he says, “I don’t see why I can’t handle snakes.” Now, many Catholics and Charismatic Protestants might be offended by this strip, but Marlette cannily combines two Southern passions—sports, especially basketball, and religion—to capture Southern attitudes toward two religious practices that might seem outlandish to outsiders. And it all comes from the mouth of a preacher, so how can anyone be offended! Marlette was brilliant. I didn’t ever get to meet Doug Marlette, but I did have a brief moment of contact with him a few years ago. When I was still the publisher at Continuum International Publishing, we published a book by Don Capps on religion and humor. I wanted to have a frame from one of Marlette’s strips featuring Will B. Dunn on the cover; I scoured my collections and found a few that worked. I talked to my friend, Sam Hodges, then at the Charlotte Observer, and asked him if he could pass along Doug Marlette’s information. Sam gave me an e-mail address and a home phone number, which he said to call anytime. I was reluctant to call Doug Marlette—whom I so admired—and bother him at home, but I did e-mail him and we had a nice little correspondence. Although I addressed him as Mr. Marlette, he quickly asked me to call him Doug. When I asked about using the cartoons, he gave his permission and charged a minimal amount. He then very generously told us that if wanted to use any cartoons in the book, there would be no charge. Before this conversation, I had much admired Doug Marlette, but my admiration grew by leaps and bounds that day. Here was a well-known, award-winning and world-recognized cartoonist whose personality was forever defined for me that day by his gracious manner and generosity. On June 3, 2005, Doug Marlette dropped many pearls of wisdom before the graduating class of Durham Academy in Durham, North Carolina. Here is Doug’s inimitable voice one last time: Almost everyone is anxious or depressed or distracted sometimes. It’s called being human. What used to be the human condition is now a symptom for a disorder or a disease for which they have a cure. But instead of recognizing that fact and ignoring the sales pitch, we begin to wonder what's wrong with us. Whether the cure is deodorant, mouthwash or Ivy League schools, marketing and advertising are designed first to create a sense of inadequacy and anxiety, then to offer to solve the artificially created problem by selling you the solution.
We will miss you, Doug. |