Loser of the Month: W.W. Norton & Company and author David Wallis

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When you publish a book called Killed Cartoons: Casualties from the War on Free Expression, the whole point would seem to be that you're speaking up for unfettered satire. Apparently not. The publishers of Killed Cartoons ... killed one of the cartoons!

By Joe Bob Briggs

It was a cartoon by one of The Door's old friends, Doug Marlette, the same Doug Marlette who did all those marvelous satires of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker in the eighties and once graced our cover with his haunting image of Jesus on a television-aerial cross.

In this case, the offending cartoon was called "What Would Mohammed Drive?" and as you can see, it's done in Marlette's usual take-no-prisoners style. First it was killed by Marlette's employer, The Tallahassee Democrat, in 2002. Then it was killed again by Norton when the book came out. David Wallis, the editor of the book, had gone to the nation's editorial cartoonists and asked them to submit to him cartoons that had been spiked by editors. (One of the cartoonists was afraid to give Wallis anything, for fear of being fired.) Marlette, who has bounced around to several newspapers and now wields his pen at The Tulsa World, contributed three—two Christian- themed and one Islamic. Guess which one got taken out of the book.





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