Editorial Cartoons and Cartoonists Honored in Chicago

I recently had the pleasure of attending a great little event, sponsored by Columbia College Chicago's j-department, featuring editorial cartoon writers. I've been on the j-department's advisory board for a bit, but hadn't had the chance to attend the school's signature Fischetti Editorial Cartoon Competition until this year.

It was a treat to see today that Michael Ramirez won a Pulitzer for his work. He was the big winner of the Fischetti contest this year too. [Who knew Investor's Business Daily had such a fantastic editorial cartoon section?] Check out the photo of Ramirez at the Fischetti event with Columbia's J-Department Chair Nancy Day (photo by Jody Warner).

I'm still hoping to get a copy of Ramirez' remarks from the Fischetti event. He had some important things to say about the dwindling crowd of accomplished editorial cartoonists. So did Andy Marlette, who spoke in tribute of his uncle and mentor, Pulitzer-Prize winner Doug Marlette. The elder Marlette, as you may recall, was killed in a car crash a year ago.

Below is a draft of the comments Andy delivered at the Fischetti event. I'm told he ad-libbed a bit. Also, here's a couple images Andy passed along, cartoons in honor of Doug Marlette: Uncle Doug and Marlette & Falwell.

Andy Marlette at Fischetti:

Hello, and thank you so much for having me. Doug Marlette was my father’s little brother and my favorite uncle. He was always the cool uncle, the young uncle with the pretty wife who rivaled even him in coolness. Throughout childhood, despite his 6’2” frame, he always seemed more like a natural member of our squirrelly fraternity of Marlette children than one of the grownups. He was the master scary-story teller. He was a dominating force in the low post in our childhood basketball games. And for me, always being known as “the kid in class who can draw,” my uncle the cartoonist stood as the hereditary source of that talent.

He was the uncle that everyone said I took after. Sometimes it was for the personality and drawing talent. Sometimes it was my annoyed parents claim that “you’re just like you’re Uncle Doug when he was your age: too damn smart for your own good!” I always wondered if that was supposed to make me feel bad.

And my life has mimicked his to some extent. We both graduated from the same high school and community college in Sanford, Florida. We both attended services at the First Baptist Church in Sanford where we were both accused of being too contentious with the old ladies who taught Sunday school classes there.

Some of our first cartoons ran in the same publications back home. When it comes to higher education, our storylines diverge somewhat, due to the fact that he became a Florida State Seminole and drew cartoons for his college paper, The Flambeau, whereas I became a Florida Gator and drew for mine, The Independent Florida Alligator. This in no way affected my admiration for my uncle, but I do take great pride in the fact that I was able to correct his error in collegiate judgment. Go Gators.

And now to further the Marlette mimicry, I’ll be damned if I didn’t grow up to be an editorial cartoonist. I ponder this: his life and mine, the connectedness of it all and this art form that I’ve been summoned to. Would I draw cartoons had he not? Is it coincidence? Is it fate? Is it genetics?

Yes, my path is inevitably tied to his; I have accepted this. But every time I get a paycheck, I think of my Uncle Doug and curse that son of a bitch for not having been a corporate executive instead.

On the day he died, I had just returned from lunch and sat back at my desk in the newsroom. Our office secretary suddenly appeared and said that our editor needed to see me in his office. She followed me in and closed the door and after I sat down, my editor said, “Andy, your uncle was in an accident; this just came across the desk. We are so sorry…” He passed me a printout of the initial AP wire release that said Doug had been killed.

For the remainder of that day I drank heavily and made all the wrenching phone calls. Immediately, I felt the first tremors of how his death shook the world. My inbox flooded with condolences from everyone you could imagine, people I had never met in my life: reporters, columnists, cartoonists, politicians, his former public school teachers. My cell phone even rang from a Tallahassee area code and on the other end was the audibly horrified voice of Governor Charlie Crist, who called to offer sincere condolences and supportive words.

Sometime late into the night, I sat down to draw Uncle Doug’s obituary cartoon.
In the days that followed, the family all made our solemn pilgrimages to the small and beautiful town of Hillsborough, North Carolina. Upon arriving, we would discover that hundreds and hundreds of others who had loved Doug over the years had decided to do the same. His extraordinary sendoff was at once celebratory and heartbreaking, filled with bluegrass music, BBQ, soggy eyes, fried food, sweet tea and the loving, poetic words of his friends. It was a soaring testament to the character, love and work of my uncle. It was a soaring testament to what a cartoonist can come to mean to the world.

But of all the beautiful eulogies that were delivered that day, of all the wonderful sentiments and stories told, I do not know that anyone articulated precisely what this man was as an editorial cartoonist and just how he stood in the eyes of his fellow cartoonists. I would like to try to today.

Doug’s best friend and author, Pat Conroy, saw Doug’s literary mind spiritually linked to that of fellow North Carolinian, Thomas Wolfe. Well when it comes to my uncle’s cartooning, I too see that Carolina soul-bond in the fact that his work was identical in spirit, style and power to another of North Carolina’s most brilliant sons, Michael Jordan.
I say this not simply as his adoring nephew, but as a developing cartoonist and a student of the art form: Doug Marlette was the Michael Jordan of editorial cartooning.

To look back on his decades of cartoons is like watching the endless highlight reels of Jordan; each slam-dunk every bit as thrilling today as they were then:
Marlette versus Falwell: a drawing of Eden, Falwell is the serpent speaking into a PTL television camera saying, “Jim and Tammy-Faye were expelled and left me in charge.”
Marlette versus the Pope: His holiness bearing the proclamation of “No Women Priests,” Marlette’s inscription: “Upon this rock I will build my church” with an arrow pointing to the Pope’s large, domed skull.

Time and time again, Doug slammed it home Air-Jordan style. Always thrilling; never off; never boring. Ask any cartoonist in this room, that ain’t easy! You don’t finish your cartoon every single day and always look down on it with great pride and complete satisfaction; sometimes you wince and cringe. Uncle Doug, however, seemed always in the zone.

Most human beings will never know what it is to fly like Jordan flew, or to nail the incredible in-your-face shots that he nailed, to be so consistently great every time you step on the court. But I think Uncle Doug had a pretty good idea.

He combined natural talent with a tremendous capacity for hard work (I know for a fact that he based his work disciplines on Jordan’s legendary practice habits). His cartoons, like Jordan’s jump shot were the result of concentrating raw aggression and masterful skill and letting it fly from your fingertips. They conjure a portrait of Doug at his daily work, not hunched over his desk but rather: tongue wagging, spread eagle, soaring through the air as cameras flash, pen and brush outstretched heading en route for a slam dunk into the public consciousness. 

After I finished community college, Doug asked me to come live with him for a year as I flirted with the idea of going on to Carolina. He knew my interest in cartooning had blossomed and brought me up for a sort of apprenticeship.

Later on, my uncle was very proud of the work I did in college for The Independent Florida Alligator, and on several occasions, he stepped in to defend us when cartoons I drew got the UF melting pot of peace, unity and tolerance all stirred up.

You know, young men often need a role model in facing the challenges of adolescence; be it your first strike out in little league, your first schoolyard fight, the first girl that breaks up with you. It’s invaluable to have a guy there for you who already fought those battles.
Well, I can honestly say that Uncle Doug was there for me when I got my first death threat over a cartoon.

At my grandfather’s funeral the week before Doug passed, I told him all about my new newsroom life at The Pensacola News Journal and he hung on every detail, thrilled to hear that there were still editors out there who valued cartoonists. I showed him some of the cartoons I had done and he gushed over them. I cannot express how magnificent it feels to have your work complimented by your hero.

In recent years when we spoke of the biz, he lamented the overall state of cartooning and the current condition of free speech and told me straight up, that were he getting started in this day and age, he might not have gone into cartooning.

While I understood his feelings, he was a born cartoonist and I do not believe that he ever had such a choice in the matter.

In a 2004 piece published in Neiman Reports, Doug wrote that cartoonists were the canaries to the newspaper industry’s coalmine. I cannot disagree. But the metaphor of the canary does properly illustrate his magnitude or the whole significance of the American editorial cartoonist.

As I was re-reading Doug’s canary article a few weeks ago, thinking about what to tell you all about my uncle, another piece of bird imagery fluttered forth from the year that I lived with him before I started college. I had been toting around a paperback volume of William Butler Yeats’ poetry and he saw it and said, “Let me show you one.”

He flipped into the book and found his way to the poem, “The Second Coming,” Yeats’ apocalyptic vision for the collapse of society, the loss of hope and the dark and tragic loss of humanity… perfect material for a cartoonist.

He read the first lines:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer.

He said, “Man, you know when I was your age, I was convinced that this poem was written about the times we were living through. It was as powerful as Dylan songs, we just felt like it was written precisely about us. But now thirty years later, I imagine that your generation can probably read this and feel pretty much the same about it. ”
I have re-read that poem hundreds of times since he guided me to it.

He called me excitedly a few years back when Camille Paglia, another one of Doug’s favorites, included it in her volume “Break, Blow, Burn.” In her reading, she says:
“Symbolically, the falcon represents events escaping human control. The falconer’s distant, fading voice stands for moral reasoning, the spiritual and intellectual faculties on which civilization depend.”

In that context, I would say that the falconer’s voice is also symbolic of fading free speech. Under this premise, if the falcon cannot hear its master, we must question the skill and potency of the falconer.

In our discussions about cartooning, Doug often spoke of his disappointment in a trend towards “safe” or just flat out boring cartoons. He was also cautious of new media obsessions with animation and flashy web formats interfering with the fundamentals of good, strong cartooning.

I cannot tell you how much of the syndicated material sent to our paper each week are simply poor cartoons. Time after time, cookie-cut images of a middle aged couple sitting in front of a T.V., one of them making a snarky comment to the other. Or the constant flow of highly photo-shopped cartoons with so many words in them that, as Doug used to say, “you’re falling asleep by the time you’re done reading it.” If the falcon is drifting from our command, work like this is a reason for it.

This is why we need more than ever, our great cartoonists and why it is so tremendous to be here, where our art form is so valued. Uncle Doug, Michael Ramirez, Tony Auth, Steve Greenberg: these men are our skilled falconers. Their voices boom loud and clear. They cartoon the way it was meant to be done, and the way that our society desperately needs it to be done.

There is good reason that Islamic fundamentalists fear cartoons but do not fear death. Bullets and missiles are inherently hit or miss. However, in a war against fascist beliefs and oppressive inhumanity, a good cartoon can be an atomic bomb.

So thank you, thank you, thank you, to all you Fischetti folks here at Columbia College, for all you do to honor and uphold the art form and for honoring these cartoonists, our great falconers. They are the true bearers of Doug’s eternal flame. On behalf of all us Marlettes, and as Uncle Doug himself would say, “Bless your hearts!”