Every elementary school has a kid with a knack for drawing ridiculous pictures of people. Other children like him because he lets them share his pictorial revenge on the teachers and bullies who secretly fear his pen.
If such a kid were to grow up to be listed in Who`s Who, you`d be surprised. But if that kid were to grow up and get a Who`s Who listing specifically for drawing ridiculous pictures of people, you might start to think the world had gone mad.
In a sense, you would be right.
Don Martin, who has been a Mad magazine cartoonist for nearly three decades, is listed in the 1984-85 edition of Who`s Who in America. It`s a distinction of which he is proud, though he shrugs it off with a modest,
”It`s nice.”
The artist is listed for doing what he has done ever since he was a boy in New Jersey: drawing ridiculous pictures of people. He said he was rarely punished for those juvenile masterpieces, although some of his friends were not so fortunate.
”There was one kid who couldn`t control himself when I`d show him a drawing,” Martin recalled, deadpan. ”He`d break up. He was the one who got in trouble. I`d slip him a drawing underneath the desk. He`d see it, he`d guffaw and out he`d go.”
Countless school children who have surreptitiously read Mad or any of Martin`s books in class the last 28 years have a pretty good idea of how that kid felt. Many of them, too, have found it impossible to control their hilarity when viewing the work of ”Mad`s maddest artist.” In a Don Martin cartoon, a pole-vaulting flea can be killed by leaping into the eye of its trainer, a monk can dribble a baby like a basketball. In one particularly grisly drawing, a man feeds pieces of his wife to vultures. Outlandishness
–MADness–is the common denominator.
After recovering from the inevitable laughing fit, a kid might wonder:
What sort of person thinks up things like this? What does the guy look like?
The answer is that he looks a little like James Coburn. Martin`s 6-foot-1 frame is trim and athletic. His crown of silver hair and his sunglasses (which he often wears to protect his light-sensitive, hazel eyes) make him seem like something of an aristocratic hipster.
For a man whose drawings are so remarkably bold and animated, Don Martin, 54, is surprisingly mellow and has an unexpectedly light, uninflected voice. His laconic sentences are spoken in quick, quiet bursts, which, while direct, leave the impression of something left unsaid.
”He`s the shyest person I`ve ever met,” said Mad co-editor Nick Meglin, who has known Martin for nearly 30 years. ”He may be Mad`s maddest artist, but he`s also Mad`s shyest personality.”
The artist lives with his wife, Norma, and a Siamese cat named Genji in unincorporated Dade County, Fla., not far from the University of Miami. He describes the architectural style of his attractive home as ”Miami suburban schmaltz.”
The enclosed swimming pool is virtually the only area of the house that is not adorned with photographs, drawings or paintings. In the living room and entrance area are Martin-style renderings of Goya`s ”The Naked Maja,”
Botticelli`s ”Birth of Venus” and Leonardo`s ”Mona Lisa.” Also hanging in the living room are a lithograph of female figures and an abstract etching by Norma Martin.
The cartoonist usually works at the drawing board in his studio, a pleasant chamber that is entered through the dining room by a door that can, if Martin wishes, be locked. On the walls of his studio are photographs of Charlie Chaplin, Groucho Marx, W.C. Fields and Laurel and Hardy. Throughout the room are scattered the memorabilia of a career in pop culture: Here, an alarm clock with the face of a typical Martin character and the inscription
”GET THE HELL OUTA BED,” produced by the American Greeting Card Co.;
there, a 7-foot Styrofoam character that was part of an advertising campaign for Micro Mart computer stores.
Along with the paper, pens, pencils, erasers, books and other tools of his trade, Martin keeps a 5-speed bicycle in his office. Probably the oldest object in the room is a small drawing showing a farmer, a cow and a haystack that he did when he was about 12. A typical Martin touch is that the farmer in this seemingly peaceful setting is holding a jug in his hand.
Don Edward Martin was born on May 18, 1931, in Paterson, N.J., and grew up in nearby Brookside. It`s suburban now, but during his boyhood it was a lush country setting with farms, hills and woods. He remembers it as being quiet and very beautiful. In winter he and his friends would ride sleighs along the dirt roads and never worry about cars. In summer the entire community would swim in a dammed stream that was really a sort of mud hole. He and his dog, a mutt named Mike, would take long hikes in the woods.
Don`s father, Wilbur Martin, was a school-supply salesman, so there were always plenty of pencils, pads and crayons around the house. His mother, Helen Husselrath Martin, encouraged him by keeping a scrapbook of his drawings. But it was his older brother Ralph, now a jazz pianist in the Miami area, who inadvertently got him started drawing. Don noticed that Ralph seemed to spend a lot of time sketching in composition notebooks to pass the time.
”It used to keep him very occupied, so I sort of copied him,” said Don. ”But I didn`t do the same kind of drawings. He was doing adventure stuff, but even then I liked slapstick kind of stuff.” Mickey Mouse and the Big Bad Wolf are the first characters he can remember drawing, at age 5. Soon he had progressed from simple drawings to visual storytelling.
”I liked to draw and I just did, but I took it for granted. I just kept doing it. There were some other kids who liked to draw, too. We had these sort of visual diaries–very profusely illustrated diaries.” Martin and his friends would draw pictures of places they frequented in Brookside and write a few sentences about what they did there. A small store was one hangout, so pictures of it appeared throughout the diaries. ”We didn`t have copy machines,” Martin said, ”so I had to draw it all the time. But it was always the same view: three or four guys leaning in the same position.”
Martin attended Brookside Grammar School, where he drew those notoriously unflattering portraits. By the time he was ready for art school, he had decided to pursue a career as an illustrator, because he`d become fascinated by the sort of classy illustrations he`d seen in the Saturday Evening Post and Collier`s. As a student at the Newark School of Fine and Industrial Art, he submitted illustrations to such magazines but was always rejected. He considered becoming a painter, a fine artist, and took classes at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia.
By the early 1950s, he had finished his art school training. For the next couple of years he took a variety of jobs, including creating window displays, working in a framing store and even as a bellhop. In his free time he painted. Soon he moved to New York City, where he became a paste-up artist and sold freelance drawings on the side.
”I had done some record covers, jazz records,” he said, displaying some albums, circa 1955, featuring the music of such jazz greats as Miles Davis, Stan Getz and Sonny Stitt. ”In fact, they`re still using these covers. I got $50. And I was doing some spot drawings for Metronome magazine, which was a jazz magazine.” Jazz is a continuing interest, as the many albums in his home suggest. In particular he is interested in the jazz of the `50s and `60s. ”I guess I started listening with Charlie Parker,” he said.
Martin was doing paste-up work for a man named Bill Levison, whose business happened to be just a few blocks down Lafayette Street from the Manhattan offices of the then-new Mad. Martin had read Mad, liked it, but never thought of actually drawing for it. The turning point in his career came when Levison suggested that he head over to Mad and check out job prospects. As it turned out, Mad`s editor at the time, Albert B. Feldstein, and the other editors liked his portfolio and asked him to do something with the magazine`s lunatic format in mind.
”It was on etiquette, a Mad-type cartoon,” Martin said. ”They liked the article, but they said to loosen up the drawings. So I went home and I drew hurriedly, so loose you could barely see the lines.” His revised effort was not greeted with approval. In fact, Martin`s career could have ended right there.
”They didn`t know what to do with it,” he said. ”They couldn`t use it, it was so wild.” Luckily, the cartoon had already been scheduled for publication, so Martin got one more chance. ”I went home again and stayed up all night and drew.” In that one frantic night, Martin developed the basis of the style that has served him well for all these years.
”He`s got a very original style,” said Arnold Roth, president of the National Cartoonists Society, which has honored Martin with two awards.
”There`s plenty of action in his drawings. It`s not just two people talking, it`s real cartooning.” Yet there`s an amusing stiffness to his people. Some of them seem hinged at their joints, like puppets.
Cartoon historian Maurice Horn said he likes Martin`s drawings because the characters in them are such extreme personalities.
”They are gross, they are uncouth, they make noises when they eat,”
said Horn, who wrote ”The World Encyclopedia of Cartoons.” He thinks there`s a good reason Martin was dubbed Mad`s maddest artist. Other Mad cartoonists
–Dave Berg, Jack Davis, Mort Drucker, Sergio Aragones, Antonio Prohias
–are mad, he said, ”but always within a reasonable framework.”
Some of Martin`s work is ”sick humor,” a phenomenon that peaked in the 1950s and is characterized by jokes about such taboo subjects as illness, bodily functions and death. ”He not only gets away with it, but it`s hilarious,” said editor Meglin. Martin is still very much the little devil trying to shock the kid at the next desk and make him laugh his way into the principal`s office.
When Martin began drawing for Mad, there was quite a bit of variation in the figures he drew. But by the early 1960s, his style had become quite distinct. ”You can spot a Don Martin from a mile away,” Meglin said. Almost all the characters Martin draws–from cowboys to hula dancers to a superhero called Captain Klutz to a pair of clods called Fester and Karbunkle to any of his people named Fonebone to an Elvis Presley lookalike named Shmelvis Parsley –share certain characteristics. Perhaps Martin`s early experiences drawing the same pictures again and again for the visual diaries of his youth partly account for this striking consistency.
His characters generally have prominent jaws and mouths that open wide enough to please any dentist. Eyes are so close-set that they touch and, frequently, cross. Pinky fingers tend to stick out in an overly dainty manner, and the feet are a podiatrist`s nightmare.
”The way the feet are comes from Charlie Chaplin,” Martin said. ”His feet go out, and he`s got longer shoes than are necessary. The toes turn up.” Other influences he cites include the Three Stooges, Laurel and Hardy
(remember those pinkies) and Red Skelton.
”He`s the equivalent on paper of the Marx Brothers,” Horn said.
Sound effects are another important Martin trademark, and he puts a lot of thought into them. In Martin`s world, an electric chair in operation makes a BIZZATZ sound, a toilet flushes with a GALOOK, a steamroller goes SKLORTCH as it flattens a man, a barber slices a customer`s nose off with a FWIP and SPRING SPROING TOON GLINK PEEEEN is the sound of a wristwatch spontaneously exploding. At times, Martin`s sound effects achieve distinct rhythms, almost as if they were the songs of scat singers. SHIP-TIPPIDY-TIPPIDY-TAP, SHAPADA- PAPADA SHIPADA-SHAP! is what he thinks tap-dancing sounds like.
Although the elements of the cartoonist`s style have remained consistent for many years, that style has not stagnated. ”It`s still evolving, it`s still changing,” he said.
Martin moved to South Florida 25 years ago to be with his first wife. The move from New York was supposed to be temporary, but he liked the state enough to stay. The marriage, however, ended in 1977. Martin has a son, Max, now in his mid-20s.
About six years ago, the cartoonist married the former Norma Haimes, whom he had known many years earlier when he was a student in Philadelphia. She helps him in his work, sometimes coming up with ideas for cartoons. One gets the impression that she is protective of him and his talent.
Most days he gets up around 6 a.m. and is at work in his studio by 9. He takes a noontime lunch break and then goes back to the drawing board for a couple of hours. After that he might go for a run, then get back to work. To help shut out distractions, he sometimes closes the blinds on his window.
As he goes about the business of his life, he keeps a list of subjects that he thinks might help get his creative juices flowing at the drawing board. To get ideas he may also flip through an encyclopedia, TV Guide or the Yellow Pages; a word will sometimes touch off a series of associations, leading to a cartoon.
”It`s just loosening your hair,” his wife said. ”It doesn`t matter what you do. You can sit and stare at a wall.”
”That`s what I usually do,” Martin said.
