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MAD Cartoonist Don Martin Dies
inbred writes "Don Martin, longtime Mad magazine cartoonist who drew an assortment of wild-haired characters, punctuating the grotesque action with wacky words like SPLOP! and POIT!, has died. He was 68."
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Was he just walking down the street, minding his own business, when suddenly kerplunk, he was lying down holding a lily? There's got to be more to it that that.
TROLL VS TROLL stories.
--- Here instead
Garfield was a very good strip in it's first 5 years. The perspective and setup was unique. Then Jim Davis was hit with "moichendizing". The cartoon show, tons of toys and books, etc. At that point, the strip began showing signs of being 'tired'. It's still going, almost 20 years later, but it's obviously nothing groundshaking now.
The same thing has happened to Scott Adams and Dilbert. Popularity and the TV show have really screwed up the fresh look of the comic.
I'd argue that we didn't see this with Bill Waterson or Gary Larson because they only allowed their work for books and the occasional promotional items; both were able to stay fresh for much longer, and rather than draw out and get repetitive, they quit the business on time.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
Cracked Magazine was always a better magazine. Mad magazine - like Mad TV - is and was always stuck in a rut. Their comedic style fizzled long ago; and was so often dependant on fads that came and went just as easily as their foul humor. Cracked magazine was different - it had and still has humour that goes beyond the childish parody of it's more established competitor.
Cracked magazine was always a little more respectable - in more ways than one. And I think Don Martin recognized Cracked's valuable qualities; which helped lead to his future with Cracked Magazine. I'll always love Don Martin's gift to my life - he gave me the knowledge that despite simplistic drawings a good bag of humour can make everyone laugh.
Thanks Don.
Joseph Elwell.
I loved Don Martin's work. It's truly sad to see him go. I hope that both Mad and Cracked (which also used some of his work) give him fitting tributes. The man was great at what he did.
Adieu, Don. You'll be missed, but never forgotten.
QA to the rescue, killing bugs on sight.
Cheers, Don, and thanks.
**>>BELCH
Check out Ralph Snart Comics
Reid Flemming
Steven
Flaming Carrot
Most of these are relatively defunct, but they all reek of true, timeless, awe-inspiring greatness.
**>>BELCH
The repetitive strips always use the same gags, and have been around for what seems like forever. Marmaduke. Ziggy. Peanuts. There won't be any earth-shattering ideas, nor anything to shock you. The same-ol', same-ol'. They'll always be popular, because they provide comfort from what you read on the front page.
The creative strips are far more rare. They entertain by their newness, by innovation. The Far Side. Calvin and Hobbes. Dilbert. The creative cartoonists tend to burn out -- Bill Waterson and Gary Larson both couldn't handle the pressure.
Jim Davis won't ever run out of new ideas -- he has all the ones he'll ever need. I hope, though, that Scott Adams hangs around for a few more years.
Here's to cartoonists.
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Earth first? Oooh, and I was thinking of paying the rent.
Oh, man, moderated _down_. Guess it had to happen sooner or later...
I'm sorry. What I meant to say was 'please excuse me.'
what came out of my mouth was 'Move or I'll kill you!'
What people frequently forget is that when MAD went from a comic book format to a magazine format in 1955, one of the first artists the late William Gaines hired was one Don Martin.
Martin's quirky (but very funny) style of cartoon work was truly unique and was a major mainstay at MAD until he had that unfortunate falling out with MAD back in 1988.
He will be seriously missed.
Raymond in Mountain View, CA
Don't forget Sluggy, too.
Sluggy is one of the very comics left (online or not) that is willing to do story arcs that lasts often for several months at a time.
Raymond in Mountain View, CA
Flenser, eh?
I knew I forgot something - I really meant to put Vernor Vinge on that list, too.
But if you really meant that there were some authors - Asimov and Heinlein - whose stuff you thought was great without any exceptions...then you actually liked those last Heinlein novels?
Surely even the greatest of authors may be responsible for one or two complete turkeys, though these tend to be forgotten.
I admit it's hard to find something particularly awful from Asimov but that's surely because (i) his output was so enormous that it's hard to find the room to remember the least good of his stories, and (ii) his writing seems fairly uniform in its mediocrity by today's standards.
I'll amend that insofar as to say that he did write some stuff which really sticks in my mind - the short story The Last Question and the novel The Gods Themselves. I also thought his later Robot and Foundation novels got better as the stories converged.
You know it only just occurred to me that The Last Question anticipated F J Tipler's Omega Point Theory by several decades.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Nice flame, man!
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
What kind of twisted mentality could possibly mark up my post as INFORMATIVE???!?!
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
FLOOBADOOP! That should be preserved for posterity!
:o)) Sound of an empty glass bottle bouncing off your head - DOONT!
He was my favourite too. Here are some more Don Martin sound effects, from some Don Martin Sound Effect Stickers I got with an issue of Mad Magazine way back in about 1975 (they've stayed fresh in my mind all that time):
Sound of treading in a rather moist dog turd - GLITCH!
Sound of being hit in the face with a frying pan: PWANG!
Sound of a springy saw blade bent back then released to smack you in the face - FOINZAPP!
Sound of being poked in the eyeball with a lit cigarette - SIZAFITZ!
Sound of someone drilling into your forehead with a power drill - BZZOWNT!
Sound of being hit in the face by a large wet fish - SPLADAP!
Sound of being being poked in the eye by one of those thin metal rod-type towel rails that stick out from the wall - SHTOINK!
...and my all-time favourite
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
For example, I read Science Fiction but I haven't found any single author since Heinlein and Asimov that I'll buy and enjoy everything they produce.
:o/
I think this must be the result of a combination of viewing the past through rose-tinted glasses and not knowing what to look at in the bookshop.
For starters, Asimov wrote great science fiction - real page turners - but in retrospect it was just traditional pulp. It lacked any kind of sophistication and didn't really demand much from the reader. Heinlein was truly the master in terms of story (eg. The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag) but this reputation was won solely on the strength of his output back in the so-called Golden Age. As he aged, his stories and characterisations were increasingly saturated with self-indulgence, saccharine sentimental and sexual fantasies. The rot started to set in around the time of Stranger In a Strange Land and Time Enough for Love. By the time he wrote Number of the Beast his style was hardly recognisable and that book is about enough to make anybody puke. I didn't even bother reading Job at all.
The advent of "New Wave" sci-fi in the seventies meant lean times for those of us who liked good hard science fiction stories, with a traditional narrative structure (a beginning a middle and an end). NB I'm generalising so please don't flame me OK? The likes of Philip K Dick didn't appeal to everyone, some of these stories tended to be a bit too abstract for pulp fans.
But in the eighties and nineties Hard Science fiction enjoyed a resurgence. You may not like the bleak worlds portrayed by "cyberpunk" authors like William Gibson but science fiction has largely moved on from there by now. A lot of science fiction these days has a more optimistic tone.
There is no basis of fact in the suggestion that there is no more good Science Fiction being written any more. I'd particularly recommend you have another look at:
Orson Scott Card - not just Ender's Game, one of my favourites was a book called Hot Sleep, now out of print but re-written and re-released as The Worthing Saga
Kim Stanley Robinson - Red Mars. A truly wonderful book describing the first colonisation of the red planet in stunning detail, it actually makes it believable.
Greg Bear - Eon and its sequel Eternity. Lovely, traditional hard Science Fiction.
Greg Egan - Diaspora. Beautiful story and characterisation. Was developed out of his short story Wang's Carpets which makes up one chapter of the book (the idea behind it will blow your mind, guaranteed).
Peter F Hamilton - The Reality Dysfunction &c. Traditional Space opera at its best.
Stephen Baxter - Voyager and Titan. Totally credible very near future space exploration. Like K S Robinson he's researched NASA's stuff very thoroughly and it pays off. he also did The Time Ships, a fairly convincing sequel to HG Wells' The Time Machine authorised by Wells' estate.
Iain M Banks - all of the "Culture" novels, particularly Use of Weapons (although that particular book does play around with the narrative structure a bit, for a very good reason).
Michael Marshall Smith - Only Forward and Spares. Very unusual stories. A bit like Iain M Banks.
Ken Macleod - The Star Fraction, The Stone Canal and The Cassini Division. Actually The Star Fraction wasn't released in the US because it goes on about leftist politics a lot. You can get it from amazon.co.uk if you're not boycotting Amazon.
Neal Stephenson - I'd better mention Snow Crash and The Diamond Age before I get drummed out of Slashdot...I'd probably have mentioned them anyway but it's a bit hard to be sure when you just know someone's waiting to jump down your throat
NB. I don't mean this to be an exhaustive list of my favourite contemporary Science Fiction by any means. But if you read all the above I'm certain you'll find that more than a few of them will excite you, and make you want more.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
I wish to exclude whiners from the comments page. They are pointless. What good does it do to anyone to know that someone doesn't want to see an article. Most of these people although sometimes add something to the discussion simply are being annoying. They are saying very little interesting things in their whining and for many of us this just simply means nothing. People skips articles every second people whines every second. Now if someone prominent right now like the president or Linus whined that would be news. Most of these whinings aren't. They are just people who everyone thought would whine anyway.
I wish to exclude whiners from the comments page. They are pointless. [...]
Does anyone else see the irony here?
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
I'm saddened to see Don go. I loved Mad back in the 70's. In fact, to this day, I still haven't seen most of the "classic" American movies of the 70's, but I have read the Mad versions :)
As for Sergio, I'm glad he's still around. He put out a wicked parody/kick in the nuts version of Blair Witch last month, and I laughed my ass off on every page.
Essay Topic: Compare and contrast Don Martin and Sergio Aragones comic stylings with respect to dialog vs. sound effects. Sergio's were silent movies, while Don's were silent movies with somebody behind the screen doing insane sound effects.
SHTOINK!
Pope
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
It's harder and harder because there is far much more noise these days.
It used to be that people only ever got noticed because they had talent, or at least, it was more like that than it is today.
These days, there is so much shit crammed into your face it's hard to get away from it and find something interesting.
Know how I find interesting things? My friends.
Interesting music, Interesting booze, interesting sports, interesting.. everything.
It serves to reinforce that you are GROWING UP. (That is you, in general, not you as an individual, as you are obviously not growing up)
Many readers here I bet are 25 or under....
And lots of the people we grew up looking up to are starting to get rather old.. so it serves to let us know that we are mortal, and that soon we will be those icons for the generations to come.
Martin based his humor on misery and misfortune, to crack "sick" jokes. The magazine dubbed him "Mad's Maddest Cartoonist." The guy poisoning pigeons in the park - "I hate pigeons" - winds up killing the people who gather around to sample his scrumptious popcorn. Mona Lisa, as the reader realizes only in the last frame of the strip, is sitting on a toilet. Hapless boobs with big feet get squashed in all manner of ways.
"There's always been physical suffering in comedy," he once said. "Even ancient clowns kicked each other in the seat of the
pants or hit each other over the head. It's the same thing in our time, just a little stronger."
The cartoons had a vocabulary all their own. "SHKLIP" was the sound made when construction workers tossed concrete at
each other. "SPLOP" described a surgeon throwing body parts into a doggie bag. "FAGROON" came from a collapsing
skyscraper.
His license plate read "SHTOINK."
"Is it funny? That's the only test I know when it comes to cartooning," Martin once said. "Not whether it's sick, or whether
it's going to ruin people's values or morals. You only have to ask a simple question: 'Is it funny?'"
His twisted approach influenced generations of younger cartoonists.
"Don Martin was the one who really stood out," "The Far Side" cartoonist Gary Larson told The Miami Herald in a story
published in 1990. "I really always loved his work. He was such a great artist."
Martin left Mad magazine in 1987 after a falling-out with its publisher, the late William Gaines, accepting a job at Cracked, a
competitor.
Martin chafed at the tradition that Mad, like most publishers, retained all rights to reprint and profit from his work that it
used, paying him on a free-lance basis. But he put out paperbacks of cartoons not published in the magazine, eventually
selling more than 7 million copies.
Martin drew despite a degenerative eye condition that forced him to undergo cornea transplants, wear special, highly
uncomfortable contact lenses and use a magnifying glass while drawing.
"He was a shy and retiring sort of guy, considering he drew a comic strip that was crazy," said a longtime friend, Laurence
Donovan.
Martin was born in Clifton, N.J., and began his undergraduate work at the Newark Institute. He earned a fine arts degree from
the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. He began submitting drawings to the fledgling Mad magazine in the mid-50s.
Movie News - "Entertainment news, bitch!"
And the brethren went away edified.
The site is here: http://members.tripod.de/mad_2/donmar tin.html
Funny stuff.
There's no reason for a sig here.
http://rcswww.urz.tu-dresden.de/~haensel/Don_Marti n/don_martin_main.html
I can't help thinking Mad was where I learned the word "Plotz". I hope Don would prefer that in a headline.
Paul Boutin | writer for Slate, Wired, etc
Seems like more and more brilliant artists are dying or retiring these days, with none stepping forward to replace them. The comic artists of today are like pen-lights to the artistic flames of men like Don Martin or Charles Shulz or Carl Barks or (in another vein of comic art) Jack Kirby.
Among readers of MAD, I have no doubt that Don Martin will be missed.
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BOINK!
Okay, moments up. You may all resume your normal, crass, undeserving lives.