Don Martin

Don Martin (May 18, 1931 – January 6, 2000) was an American cartoonist whose best-known work was published in Mad from 1956 to 1988.

His popularity and prominence were such that the magazine promoted Martin as "Mad's Maddest Artist."

Born on May 18, 1931, in Paterson, New Jersey, and raised in nearby Brookside and Morristown, Martin studied illustration and fine art at Newark School of Fine and Industrial Arts between 1949 and 1951 and subsequently graduated from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia in 1952.

He underwent two corneal transplants: the first in 1949, at the age of 18, and the second forty years later in 1989.

After the first procedure, Martin's head had to be held in place for three days by a pair of sandbags to prevent movement.

In 1953, he worked briefly as a window trimmer and frame maker before providing paste ups and mechanicals for various Offset printing clients and beginning his career as freelance cartoonist and illustrator.

Martin's work first appeared in Mad in the September 1956 issue.

Martin suffered from eye problems for his entire life.

Just prior to his work with Mad, Don Martin illustrated the album covers of a few legendary jazz artists for Prestige Records, including Miles Davis' 1956 album Miles Davis and Horns (Prestige LP 7025).

He also did The Art Farmer Septet (Prestige LP 7031), Sonny Stitt / Bud Powell / J.J. Johnson (Prestige LP 7024), Kai Winding's Trombone By Three (Prestige LP 7023) and Stan Getz' The Brothers (Prestige LP 7022).

Martin brought his portfolio to the Mad offices in 1956 and was immediately given an assignment.

"The drawings that I first brought to them were kind of tight," he later recalled.

"There was a very tight kind of design quality — I was using a very fine line. They encouraged me to loosen up a little bit and that’s what I did."

Martin often was billed as "Mad's Maddest Artist."

Whereas other features in Mad, recurring or otherwise, typically were headed with pun-filled "department" titles, Martin's work always was headed with only his name—"Don Martin Dept."

— further fanfare presumably being unnecessary.

At his peak, each issue of Mad typically carried three Martin strips of one or two pages each.

But Martin also did several longer pieces, including parodies of poems by writers like Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Edgar Guest and Clement Clarke Moore, thematic collections of gags on a single subject such as Moses, superheroes or Dracula, as well as full parodies of the Gentle Ben TV series and the films Excalibur and Conan the Barbarian.

He also drew some insert bonus material for "Mad Specials" such as stickers and posters.

Although Martin's contributions invariably featured outrageous events and sometimes outright violations of the laws of space-time, his strips typically had unassuming generic titles such as "A Quiet Day in the Park" or "One Afternoon at the Beach."

The six-panel "The Impressionist" features a bull who becomes a famous artist by smearing an outdoor painter against his canvas and displaying his remains as an abstract design.

The four-panel "One Night in the Miami Bus Terminal" presents a man who approaches a machine labeled "Change," inserts a Dollar Bill, and changes to a woman.

In another gag, a man is flattened by a steamroller but is saved by the intervention of two passersby, who fold him as a paper airplane and throw him to the nearest hospital.

Martin's immediately recognizable drawing style (which featured bulbous noses and the iconic hinged foot) was loose, rounded, and filled with broad slapstick.

His inspirations, plots, and themes were often bizarre and at times bordered on the berserk.

In his earliest years with Mad, Martin used a more jagged, scratchy line.

His work probably reached its final peak of quality and technical detail in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

His style evolved, settling into its familiar form by 1964.

It was typified by a sameness in the appearance of the characters (the punchline to a strip often was emphasized by a deadpan take with eyes half open and the mouth absent or in a tight, small circle of steadfast perplexity) and by an endless capacity for newly coined, onomatopoetic sound effects, such as "BREEDEET BREEDEET" for a croaking frog, "PLORTCH" for a knight being stabbed by a sword, or "FAGROON klubble klubble" for a collapsing building.

(Martin's dedication to onomatopoeia was such that he owned a vanity license plate which read "SHTOINK," patterned after the style of his famed sound effects.)

His characters often had ridiculous, rhyming names such as Fester Bestertester or Fonebone (which was expanded to Freenbean I. Fonebone in at least one strip), as well as Lance Parkertip, Noted Notary Public.

In this middle period, Martin created some of his most absurdist work—for example, "National Gorilla Suit Day"—an extended narrative in which a hapless character is violently assaulted by a series of attackers in various disguises, including gorillas dressed as men.

Charles Taylor described Martin's unique art style:

"His people are big-nosed schmoes with sleepy eyes, puffs of wiry hair, and what appear to be life preservers under the waistline of their clothes. Their hands make delicate little mincing gestures and their strangely thin, elongated feet take a 90-degree turn at the toes as they step forward. Whether they’re average Joes or headhunters, Martin’s people share the same physique: a tottering tower of obloids. Martin puts the bodies of these characters through every kind of permutation, treating them as much like gadgets as the squirting flowers and joy buzzers that populate his gags: glass eyes pop out from a pat on the back; heads are steamrollered into manhole-cover shapes. All of this accompanied by a Dadaist panoply of sound effects found nowhere else: shtoink! shklorp! fwoba-dap! It’s unlikely Samuel Beckett was aware of Don Martin, but had he been he might have recognized a kindred spirit."

In later years, particularly during the 1980s, he let other people write most of his gags, most notably Duck Edwing.

Concurrent with his Mad output, Martin and an assortment of writers produced a series of paperback books, to which he retained the copyrights and eventual publishing rights.

"They're still using these covers," Martin told the Orlando Sentinel in 1985.

"I got $50."

He also drew greeting cards, and illustrations for jazz and science fiction magazines.

Though Martin described his art style to an interviewer in 1985: "It's still evolving, it's still changing."