Doug Dillard – RIP
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Christian cartoonist Doug Dillard has passed away.
Samuel Douglas (Doug) Dillard
July 11, 1929 – October 5, 2019
Doug’s career, outside of cartooning, consisted of serving “churches as a pastor,
youth evangelist and minister of education before launching a career in public relations.”
From the Baptist Standard obituary:
[Doug] Dillard was widely known as a cartoonist and banquet speaker. He published three collections of his cartoons, illustrated several other books and award-winning filmstrips, and for more than 30 years published weekly editorial cartoons in the Baptist Standard and other religious news magazines. His beleaguered pastor character, “Brother Blotz,” has been viewed on the walls and in newsletters of thousands of churches. One of his editorial cartoons won a Freedom Foundation Honor Certificate.
From the Baptist News obituary:
Through [Doug’s] beleaguered pastor character “Brother Blotz,” the longtime creativity consultant for churches and denominational agencies used the medium to help Baptists better understand themselves by not taking themselves too seriously.
“There are some things that can be said with art that can’t be said in words,” Dillard said in a 1988 interview with Baptist Press. “People accept satire in cartoons that they would be up in arms about if you said it in print.”
Dillard, vice president for external relations for the now-defunct SBC agency from 1991 until 1995, began the syndicated cartoon feature in 1961.
His first cartoon came out of an experience he had while serving as minister of education at a Southern Baptist church. After a Sunday school class resisted the then-standard practice of grouping adults for Bible study by age, Dillard drew a cartoon suggesting they instead grade classes by weight and posted it outside his office door.
“The people would come by, look at it and break up laughing,” Dillard recalled in 1974. “They knew exactly who I was talking about.”
“It didn’t make them go back to their right classes, but it stopped all the fuss,” he said.
Brother Blotz first saw print in 1961, and was eventually joined by PulpiTEARS, a spinoff of sorts.
In 1967 Doug added editorial cartoons to church newspapers and bulletins, as well as his Blotz panels.
Doug’s cartooning career continued into the 1990s.
Doug’s Brother Blotz website is no longer online, but, courtesy of The Wayback Machine, you can visit a couple incarnations of the site here and here where more background and cartoons are available.
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