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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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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
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.
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
BOINK!
Okay, moments up. You may all resume your normal, crass, undeserving lives.