October 2001

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Doug Marlette gets to know the School's faculty at a meeting in August. Photo by Christine Nguyen

The Drawing Card

Visiting professor Doug Marlette brings humor, talent and 30 years of creativity to his two courses in the School

By Scott LaPierre

"It’s like when you’re at the beach, and you see someone way, way, way down the beach," says Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist Doug Marlette. "You can’t make out any details at all, but somehow you can sense it’s a person you know. There’s kind of something that’s been imprinted on you, their spirit."

He’s standing with his back to the class during this free association. The black magic marker in his left hand is leaving short, thick lines in the center of a large piece of paper on an easel.

"Well," Marlette continues, pausing to look at his lines, adding one more, "if you know that feeling at the beach, caricaturing is something like that feeling. It's taking the most basic elements of someone, the spirit, and focusing on that."

It’s a Friday morning early in the fall semester, and Marlette is leading one of the two classes he’s teaching this semester. This one is called "The Editorial Cartoon: Sacred Cows-Holy Hamburger." The long table behind him is lined with 12 undergraduates and graduate students. A couple of them are aspiring editorial cartoonists.

The class is not only an exploration of craft. It’s also a look at the history and impact of editorial cartooning and what cartoons tell us about U.S. attitudes throughout the century. But what better way to get inside the mind of an editorial cartoonist than to watch him at work?

Marlette taps a couple of dots with the marker. So far there's not much on the paper: two dark squiggles for eyebrows, a curved line for a nose, and now these two dots and some wrinkles. But already, there's only one face it could be.

"It comes down to relationships between different planes, different features," Marlette says. "With Richard Nixon here, it was those shifty eyes, those wrinkles. You could see the evil was already showing." He chuckles.

Marlette’s career is exaggeration, poking fun at public officials and politicians. But he also has a great deal of affection for the faces he summons to life on paper. He adds details intuitively but with great care, instinctively measuring the effect each line will have. Stepping away from the easel, he reveals the image of a wonderfully shady, hilariously crooked Richard Nixon squinting suspiciously out at the class.

In his editorial cartooning course, Marlette is distilling 30 years of creative experience.

He got his professional start as an editorial cartoonist with The Charlotte Observer in 1972. In 1987, he joined the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and two years later he began work at Newsday in New York City. In addition to political cartoons, he’s been writing and drawing the syndicated comic strip "Kudzu" for 20 years. He still draws seven comic strips a week and five editorial cartoons. And now, as a visiting professor, he teaches his two courses in the School.

This is Marlette’s first teaching experience, and so far he says it’s been a welcome challenge.

The tension between taking a highly organized approach and a more spontaneous, freewheeling one is the biggest test so far, he says, adding that "getting a feel for the students" is the most satisfying aspect.

Dean Richard Cole, who organized the funding and logistics of Marlette’s visiting professorship, emphasizes how lucky the School is to have him.

"He is not only the most creative newspaper cartoonist out there, his expertise extends to many other media," Cole said. "He’s a novelist, he has worked on Broadway. He is multitalented, and his warmth as an individual will make him an excellent teacher."

Marlette’s other class is "Humor Writing: Behind the Chuckles Racket". His experience in this area includes his columns for Esquire and contributions to The New Republic and The Nation. He has published 17 books of comics and cartoons. In October, his first novel, The Bridge, will be published by HarperCollins.

In one of the first "Humor Writing" classes, Marlette advises 30 or so students to free up their instincts. Humor and creativity bubble up from very primitive parts of the human psyche, he maintains, and although neither can be taught explicitly, "this class is for teaching the things that can be taught." There is no wrong way to do the writing assignments for the class, he says, so people should "free their Promethean voice."

There is no secret to success, Marlette tells the writing class. When he was just getting his start as an artist, he had to struggle for hours to come up with ideas. He mimes crumpling up sheet after sheet of paper and throwing them away. Now he can sit down and the ideas start to flow more naturally.

"It’s all about practice," he says. "Over the years, you just learn efficiency. You can sense the dead ends before you start down the path. You learn to go to the heat."

Practice and daily dedication are at least as important as natural talent, he says:

"More important than perfection is just simply the ‘doingness.’"

Back in the Friday morning "Editorial Cartooning" course, Marlette is adding vertical lines to the bottom of Richard Nixon's squinting mug: five o'clock shadow.

The caricature looks complete.

"Okay, gang," he says to the class. "You think this is it. But here’s where we really separate the men from the boys. Take note."

With the marker he adds two horizontal lines: one each projecting straight out from the middle of Nixon's forehead. It takes a second to figure out what the lines are, but then the effect reveals itself and students realize the image was incomplete without them: they are Nixon's hunched shoulders.

The class takes note. Then, flipping to a fresh piece of paper, Marlette says, "Good, now let’s move on to the democrats."

Scott LaPierre is a first-year master’s student in the professional sequence.