Editorial cartooning

Kathleen Parker remembers Doug Marlette

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Alan Gardner July 17, 2012 1 minute 3 comments

Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker remembers Doug Marlette five years after his untimely death in an auto accident in Mississippi in 2007.

I know I speak for dozens of close friends and family members ? and even a good number of enemies ? when I say that Marlette was that rare creature who could size up a person, place, event or trend with a glance that was simultaneously mirthful and homicidal. He was an intellectual assassin with a preternatural knack for zeroing in on hypocrites and phonies, and woe unto those under his gaze. Your most deeply guarded secret was transparent to him; your most precious conceit a speck of lint on his sleeve.

Doug was one of those cartoonists I had hopes to meet in real life. His book In Your Face: A Cartoonist at Work influential to me while I was in high school and college trying to learn the craft.