Doug Marlette, who won a Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning and created "Kudzu," the popular syndicated strip, was killed on Tuesday in a car accident in Mississippi. He was 57.

The North Carolina-born cartoonist was on his way to Oxford yesterday when the car he was in struck a tree in wet conditions just before 10 a.m., said John Garrison, the coroner in Mississippi's Marshall County.

"Evidently, it hydroplaned, left the highway and struck the tree. There was heavy rain in the area at the time."

The car’s driver, John Davenport of Oxford, Miss., was rushed to a nearby hospital where according to reports he was treated and released within a few hours.

57-year-old Marlette, who joined the Tulsa World newspaper last year, was visiting Mississippi to help a group of high school students prepare a musical based on his comic.

"You know, there's a couple of family members I'd rather have lost instead of Doug," author Pat Conroy was quoted by Associate Press as saying. "And he would have laughed at that. This has been a shock of all shocks."

"I've simply been sitting here crying all day, not knowing the answer to that question," Conroy said. "Just don't know."

Marlette became a cartoonist for The Charlotte Observer in 1972 and before he joined the Tulsa World last year, he also worked at New York Newsday and The Tallahassee Democrat.

"He was more than a great cartoonist and author, he was a tremendous human being," Robert E. Lorton III, the World's publisher and president, said on the newspaper's Web site.