(CNN) -- Last week was a very good week for corrupt politicians, dirtbag dictators, pompous preachers, deadbeat dads, corporate suits, bloated bureaucrats and hypocrites from all walks of life.
They got a reprieve when 57-year-old editorial cartoonist and novelist Doug Marlette died when the pickup truck he was a passenger in hydroplaned and struck a tree on a back road in Mississippi.
Thus, the Pulitzer Prize-winner's poignant pen was silenced.
During four decades as a cartoonist appearing in Charlotte, Atlanta, New York, Florida and Oklahoma newspapers, as well as in syndication across the country, Marlette built a career as an equal-opportunity offender. He skewered Bill Clinton as easily as George Bush, Ross Perot as effortlessly as John Edwards; it's not too farfetched to think that Mullah Omar and Jim Bakker might have found common ground in believing Marlette was an evil, vicious, godless rodent of a man.
In his work, Marlette was indiscriminate in trying to give voice to justice and to offer unbending support for the underdog. His spirit, he often said, was forged in the South he grew up in, where he was anti-war and
anti-racism in a community grappling to come to terms with both Vietnam and civil rights in the 1960s.
His funeral was held Saturday, July 14, in a small, stone church outside Marlette's hometown of Hillsborough, North Carolina. The church is across the street from cornfields and farmland filled with hay bales, and not far from the site of the old textile mill where his grandparents worked in the 1930s.
The Red Clay Ramblers, a band Marlette collaborated with to score the musical version of his comic strip, "Kudzu," played "I'll Fly Away" to an overflowing crowd of friends, family and followers.
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