Doug Marlette would have laughed at this kind of tribute. "It's passive, weak, meaningless. Who will miss me? How? Why? Get some spark in that sentence or nobody is going to remember it. Get real," I can hear him saying.

I can hear that kind of complaint from him, even though a July 10 automobile accident in Mississippi took his life.

He always wanted communication to be direct, to the point, and shot squarely at the heart.

Maybe that is why I will miss his political cartoons so much. They were almost always edgy. Even when I agreed with his points of view, they could make me uncomfortable. In making a fair point, he might not always be fair. Marlette would not argue that point. He would simply say that a cartoonist has certain liberties to exaggerate and has a responsibility to punctuate and hit hard.

Hit hard he did. At his funeral, columnist Kathleen Parker reminded us about one of Marlette's controversial cartoons. Captioned "What would Mohammed drive?" it showed a bearded man in Middle East costume driving a Ryder truck with an atom bomb in the back.

This kind of cartooning made Marlette lots of enemies and won for him a Pulitzer Prize. But there was much more, as Parker pointed out in a column last week. "The public knew Doug primarily as cartoon boy. Funny Doug could make you laugh. Gimlet-eyed Doug could make you cringe. But the private Doug was a deep diver, a thinker of exquisite dimension who was most concerned with the profound tragedy of human existence. 'How do any of us get through it?' he often wondered aloud."

Marlette sought outlets other than political cartooning to share his ideas and concerns. In the comic pages, his "Kudzu" gave us an almost daily sermon by the country preacher Will B. Dunn. "Kudzu" also became a wonderful musical that will someday be an American classic.

What will I miss most? I will miss what we will never see -- Marlette's mature literary work. He recently published two novels and was at work on a third. His obviously autobiographical first novel, "The Bridge," won praise both as an honest and critical self-examination and as an exploration of North Carolina's sometime sorry history of labor relations. It also brought, unfortunately and unnecessarily, an unhappy breach between Marlette and many of his friends and colleagues in Hillsborough.

"Magic Time," his second novel, came out late last year. Though much of it parallels Marlette's life, it is a giant step beyond the autobiographical features of his first book. Instead, his fictional retelling of the Civil Rights struggles of the 1960s and their continuing impact on our lives found its target right in my gut. "Magic Time" is a powerful book. But its primary importance might have been in the promise it showed.

Metro magazine publisher and editor Bernie Reeves, speaking at the funeral, also saw Marlette's promise. "Like the best of heroes, Doug was brave, compassionate and talented -- and relentless in his pursuit of truth. But he was most poignantly identified as a child of the South. You could say his literary career was motivated by his fierce desire to untangle us all -- and himself."

What might have been, however, is not to be. Instead, as Joe Klein wrote in Time magazine and then said again at Marlette's funeral, "I wish Doug were around to reflect on the gothic ridiculousness of his own death, at age 57, on a back road in Mississippi, in a collision with a loblolly pine that was as straight and true and stubborn as he was."