Don Martin

• Illustration — Cover to The Mad Adventures of Captain Klutz (Signet, 1967). Art by Don Martin. Martin's immediately recognizable drawing style (which featured bulbous noses and hinged feet) 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 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.[9] (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.) In a 1981 interview with the magazine Cartoonist Profiles, Martin discussed his theory of sound effects: "When other people try to write a Don Martin sound effect for me, they don't do it correctly. Most of the time they put in a bunch of arbitrary letters that don’t mean anything at all.... I can tell that they aren't thinking about what the sound would really be like. For example, if they do somebody getting hit on the head with a crowbar, they will go 'groink.' Now, that's not a crowbar landing on the head! The sound would have a clang to it, 'pwang' or 'spwang.' 'Spwang' would mean the skull is soft, because it has a wet sound to it. The sound wouldn't be 'groink.' 'Groink' is when you put two fingers in someone's nose and pull it about six inches from the front of the face. That's 'groink'!... It wouldn't be just a bunch of letters. I figure the sounds out. In other words, I really do think about them and each sound has its own inner logic."[10] 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.[11] Martin's style was influenced by the works of Robert Crumb, E.C. Segar, Bill Holman, James Thurber, Milt Gross, Virgil Partch, and Saul Steinberg.[12] His work probably reached its final peak of quality and technical detail in the late 1960s and early 1970s,[13] though in 1985 Martin described his art style to an interviewer: "It's still evolving, it's still changing." In later years, particularly during the 1980s, he let other people write most of his gags, most notably Duck Edwing.[14] 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. For this reason, the content of these books was not included in 2007's Completely Mad Don Martin box set. Martin described his heavy workload for these projects: Once I get the OK on the roughs I start the finished drawings. I sort of begin this stage slowly, because doing the finished work always ends up being a seven-day week. An all day, and all evening ordeal. I always anticipate I can draw the books faster than I can. That is a big mistake, since it adds a lot of anxiety, and aggravation to the project. I thought I had developed a system with the last one. I worked on the book in batches of 15 pages or so. I even kept a record to see how long it took me to do the pencils, and how long it took me to do the inks, but it still ended up being seven days a week for a couple of months. I find I have to get some momentum going when I draw. I can't work with interruptions. I like to have three or four days where I don't even leave the house on an errand. I get a lot more done that way, because I build up a head of steam.

• Don Martin Steps Out (1962) • Don Martin Bounces Back (1963) • Don Martin Drops 13 Stories (1965) • Adventures of Captain Klutz (1967) • Don Martin Cooks up More Tales (1969) • Don Martin Comes on Strong (1971) • Don Martin Carries On (1973) • The Completely Mad Don Martin (1974) • Don Martin Steps Further Out (1975) • Don Martin Forges Ahead (1977) • Don Martin Digs Deeper (1979) • Don Martin Grinds Ahead (1981) • Captain Klutz II (1983) • Don Martin Sails Ahead (1986)

Martin's work has been referenced in numerous arenas, from The Simpsons and Family Guy to The Colbert Report to Jonathan Lethem's 1999 novel Motherless Brooklyn, which describes in detail the Tourette's-afflicted protagonist's affinity for Martin's cartoons. The character of Uncle Grandpa was inspired by the look of Martin's designs. In 1986, the animated feature Don Martin Does It Again was created in Germany by director Andy Knight, and produced by Gerhard Hahn's Deutsche Zeichentrick Erste Produktions GmbH & Co. KG. It won first prize at the 1986 International Children's Film Festival in Chicago.[25] Martin strips have also been adapted on Cartoon Network's Mad and the Fox sketch program MADtv. The name of the Fone Bone character in cartoonist Jeff Smith's epic graphic novel Bone is derived from Fonebone, the generic surname that Martin gave to many of the characters that appeared in his Mad magazine strips.[27] In episode No. 307, "The Day the Earth Stood Stupid" (2001), of Matt Groening's science-fiction animated television series Futurama, lead character Hermes Conrad mentions a planet called "Don Martin 3" that went "kerflooey", an homage to one of Martin's sound effects.[28] The "Stranded in Space" film shown on TV's Mystery Science Theater 3000 (episode 305) included various visual weapon sound effects (e.g., a gun with a flag which pops out, bearing the sound effect "BANG!"). After a stick of dynamite produced a banner reading "KACHOW", one of the show's characters wondered, "Kachow? Kachow?! What, is Don Martin working with you guys now?!" In 2007, a two-volume hardcover box set of Martin's complete Mad magazine work was published by Running Press. Taking their cue from one of Martin's more celebrated stories, National Gorilla Suit Day, fans have celebrated National Gorilla Suit Day by wearing gorilla suits on January 31. No specific date is given in the story, which appeared in the 1963 paperback book Don Martin Bounces Back.

Martin was honored with the Ignatz Award at the Orlando Comicon in 1980. He received the National Cartoonists Society's Special Features Award in both 1981 and 1982, and he was inducted into the Will Eisner Award Hall of Fame in 2004. Martin's cartoons appear in public collections at the National Cartoonists Society and the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum. He served as a juror at "Hürriyet Vakfı," an International Cartoon Competition held in Ankara, Turkey in 1986.