Kudzu was also the name of a comic strip by North Carolina man Doug Marlette -- it appeared in more than 300 newspapers at its peak (probably mostly in the South), won a Pulitzer Prize, and has been made into a musical. The strip ran from 1981 until Marlette's death in a car accident in 2007. Some of the major characters are a teenage boy named Kudzu Dubose (whose name obviously references the vine that Marlette said "is known to overtake cows and slow-moving children"), the Reverend Will B. Dunn, and mechanic Uncle Dub, all in the small Southern town of Bypass.