Flambeau launched cartoonist's career
Doug Marlette was a Sixties swashbuckler armed with a pen instead of a sword.
As the editorial cartoonist for the Florida Flambeau during the late '60s
and early '70s, Marlette used his rapier wit to lampoon the Legislature,
the university administration and other authority figures who tried to subdue
the "subversive" CPE.
"We were fairly swashbuckling," he said with a laugh. "It
was very lively back then."
Marlette attended FSU from 1969-71, but stopped six hours short of a degree
to become the editorial cartoonist for the Charlotte Observer. He moved
on to the Atlanta Constitution and now works at Newsday. Along the way he
picked up a Pulitzer Prize, created the comic strip Kudzu and wrote a book,
Even White Boys Get the Blues.
These days Marlette is poking fun at presidential politics, but he credits
campus politics with launching his career.
"It was great exposure," he said. "My cartoons were picked
up and run in college and underground newspapers all across the country."
He still gets teased by his friend, writer Pat Conroy, about "liberating"
the FSU yearbook, which was discontinued in the early '70s along with the
student publications department.
"We took over student publications and printed a paperback version
of the yearbook. We decided to make it more relevant and stylish, so we
did it like e.e. cummings, with everything lowercase, and decorated it with
lots of my cartoons, including the cover. It became this giant pamphlet
for student causes."
Popular on the college lecture circuit, Marlette said he's been asked to
speak "everywhere except FSU." He remembers being invited back
to campus many years ago as a "Grad Made Good," but the invitation
was rescinded when it was discovered he wasn't a "grad."
But to newspaper readers who enjoy his cartoons and comic strip, he sure
"made good." - Judy Taylor Cramer