Today's Birthdays

one click shows all of today's celebrity birthdays

Browse All Birthdays

43,625    Actors
27,931    Actresses
4,867    Composers
7,058    Directors
842    Footballers
221    Racing drivers
925    Singers
9,111    Writers

Get FamousLikeMe on your website
One line of code gets FamousLikeMe on your website. Find out more.

Subscribe to Daily updates


Add to Google

privacy policy



Famous Like Me > Writer > M > Don Martin

Profile of Don Martin on Famous Like Me

 
Name: Don Martin  
   
Also Know As:
   
Date of Birth: 3rd April 1911
   
Place of Birth: Pennsylvania, USA
   
Profession: Writer
 
 
From Wikipedia, the free Encyclopedia

Don Martin (May 18, 1931–January 6, 2000) was a popular American satirical comic artist and cartoon artist whose work appeared in MAD magazine from 1956 to 1988.

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 usually carried three Martin strips of one or two pages each.

Martin's immediately recognizable drawing style (which featured the famous "hinged foot") was loose and rounded in his early years with MAD, but settled into its familiar angular form by 1964. It was typified by a sameness in the appearance of the characters (the punchline to a strip often was accompanied by a deadpan take with eyes half open and the mouth absent) and by an endless capacity for newly coined, onomatopoetic sound effects, such as "BREEDEET BREEDEET" for a croaking frog or "FAGROON klubble klubble" for a collapsing building.

His work probably reached its peak of quality and technical detail in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Over later years, particularly during the 1980s, he let other people write most of his gags.

In his last years of working with MAD magazine, Martin had a falling out with publisher William Gaines over royalties for the "MAD Books", paperback compilations of older MAD articles and cartoons released under new general names, like "The Self-Made Mad". Gaines insisted that he had paid the cartoonists for both their publication in MAD and these future reprints. Martin did not agree, claiming at one point that he likely lost over a million dollars in royalties because of this perceived "flat rate" for this work.

He left MAD in 1987, and went to work for the rival publication Cracked. Ultimately, he died of cancer in 2000.

This content from Wikipedia is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article Don Martin